Direct Observation of Fragmentation in a Disordered, Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas

Abstract

Describing the behaviour of strongly interacting particles in the presence of disorder is among the most challenging problems in quantum many-body physics. The controlled setting of cold atom experiments provides a new avenue to address these challenges [1], complementing studies in solid state physics, where a number of puzzling findings have emerged in experiments using superconducting thin films [2,3]. Here we investigate a strongly interacting thin film of an atomic Fermi gas subject to a random potential. We use high-resolution in-situ imaging [4-7] to resolve the atomic density at the length scale of a single impurity, which would require scanning probe techniques in solid state physics [8]. This allows us to directly observe the fragmentation of the density profile and to extract its percolation properties. Transport measurements in a two-terminal configuration indicate that the fragmentation process is accompanied by a breakdown of superfluidity. Our results suggest that percolation of paired atoms is responsible for the loss of superfluidity, and that disorder is able to increase the binding energy of pairs.

References in corpus (15)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Theory of ultracold Fermi gases
• Single-Atom Resolved Fluorescence Imaging of an Atomic Mott Insulator
• Localization of preformed Cooper-pairs in disordered superconductors
• Fragmentation of Bose-Einstein Condensates
• Radiofrequency spectroscopy of a strongly interacting two-dimensional Fermi gas
• Ultracold Bose Gases in 1D Disorder: From Lifshits Glass to Bose-Einstein Condensate
• Phase Coherence and Superfluid-Insulator Transition in a Disordered Bose-Einstein Condensate
• Observing the Drop of Resistance in the Flow of a Superfluid Fermi Gas
• High-resolution imaging of ultracold fermions in microscopically tailored optical potentials
• BCS-BEC crossover in a random external potential
• Systematic investigation of the effects of disorder at the lowest order throughout the BCS-BEC crossover
• Superconductor-insulator quantum phase transition
• Superfluid-insulator transition and BCS-BEC crossover in dirty ultracold Fermi gas
• Fragmentation and the Bose-glass phase transition of the disordered 1D Bose gas

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• Weak ergodicity breaking of receptor motion in living cells stemming from random diffusivity
• Atomtronic circuits: from many-body physics to quantum technologies
• Two-terminal transport measurements with cold atoms
• A scanning gate microscope for cold atomic gases
• Spatiotemporal coherence of non-equilibrium multimode photon condensates
• Quantum Brownian Motion with Inhomogeneous Damping and Diffusion
• Critical Properties of the Superfluid - Bose Glass Transition in Two Dimensions
• Thermoelectric transport and Peltier cooling of cold atomic gases
• Enhancement of Quantum Correlation Length in Quenched Disordered Spin Chains
• Coherent multiple scattering of out-of-equilibrium interacting Bose gases
• Glassy properties of Anderson localization: pinning, avalanches and chaos
• Perspective on new implementations of atomtronic circuits
• Scale-invariant freezing of entanglement
• Superfluid Bloch dynamics in an incommensurate lattice
• Multi-Particle Tunneling Transport at Strongly-Correlated Interfaces
• Localization of interacting Fermi gases in quasiperiodic potentials
• Ferromagnetism in a Repulsive Atomic Fermi Gas with Correlated Disorder
• Out-of-equilibrium dynamics of repulsive Fermi gases in quasi-periodic potentials: a Density Functional Theory study
• Mobility edge of two interacting particles in three-dimensional random potentials
• The impact of speckle disorder on a superfluid Fermi system
• Two-body mobility edge in the Anderson-Hubbard model in three dimensions: Molecular versus scattering states
• One- and Two-Particle Problem with Correlated Disorder Potential
• Self-consistent inclusion of disorder in the BCS-BEC crossover near the critical temperature