High-resolution imaging of ultracold fermions in microscopically tailored optical potentials

Abstract

We report on the local probing and preparation of an ultracold Fermi gas on the length scale of one micrometer, i.e. of the order of the Fermi wavelength. The essential tool of our experimental setup is a pair of identical, high-resolution microscope objectives. One of the microscope objectives allows local imaging of the trapped Fermi gas of 6Li atoms with a maximum resolution of 660 nm, while the other enables the generation of arbitrary optical dipole potentials on the same length scale. Employing a 2D acousto-optical deflector, we demonstrate the formation of several trapping geometries including a tightly focussed single optical dipole trap, a 4x4-site two-dimensional optical lattice and a 8-site ring lattice configuration. Furthermore, we show the ability to load and detect a small number of atoms in these trapping potentials. A site separation of down to one micrometer in combination with the low mass of 6Li results in tunneling rates which are sufficiently large for the implementation of Hubbard-models with the designed geometries.

15 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Single-Atom Resolved Fluorescence Imaging of an Atomic Mott Insulator
• Experimental demonstration of painting arbitrary and dynamic potentials for Bose-Einstein condensates
• Experimental demonstration of single-site addressability in a two-dimensional optical lattice
• Speckle Imaging of Spin Fluctuations in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas
• Versatile two-dimensional potentials for ultra-cold atoms

Cited by in corpus (23)

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• The critical velocity in the BEC-BCS crossover
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• A conjugate gradient minimisation approach to generating holographic traps for ultracold atoms
• Peltier cooling of fermionic quantum gases
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• Zeeman-insensitive cooling of a single atom to its two-dimensional motional ground state in tightly focused optical tweezers
• Quantum simulators by design - many-body physics in reconfigurable arrays of tunnel-coupled traps
• A versatile high resolution objective for imaging quantum gases
• Feedback-enhanced algorithm for aberration correction of holographic atom traps
• Preparation of ${}^{87}$Rb and ${}^{133}$Cs in the motional ground state of a single optical tweezer
• Simulating Dirac models with ultracold atoms in optical lattices
• Optical runaway evaporation for multi-BEC production
• Piezoelectrically-actuated time-averaged atomic microtraps
• Modeling the metastable dynamics of correlated structures
• Preparation of ultra-cold atomic-ensemble arrays using time-multiplexed optical tweezers
• Direct production of fermionic superfluids in a cavity-enhanced optical dipole trap
• Tunnel-coupled optical microtraps for ultracold atoms