Fermionic suppression of dipolar relaxation: Observation of universal inelastic dipolar scattering

Abstract

We observe the suppression of inelastic dipolar scattering in ultracold Fermi gases of the highly magnetic atom dysprosium: the more energy that is released, the less frequently these exothermic reactions take place, and only quantum spin statistics can explain this counterintuitive effect. Inelastic dipolar scattering in non-zero magnetic fields leads to heating or to loss of the trapped population, both detrimental to experiments intended to study quantum many-body physics with strongly dipolar gases. Fermi statistics, however, is predicted to lead to a kinematic suppression of these harmful reactions. Indeed, we observe a 120-fold suppression of dipolar relaxation in fermionic versus bosonic Dy, as expected from theory describing universal inelastic dipolar scattering, though never before experimentally confirmed. Similarly low inelastic cross sections are observed in spin mixtures, also with striking correspondence to universal dipolar scattering predictions. The suppression of relaxation opens the possibility of employing fermionic dipolar species---atoms or molecules---in studies of quantum many-body physics involving, e.g., synthetic gauge fields and pairing.

arXiv commentnew title and text edited for clarity; 4.5 pages, 4 figures, 1 table; supplemental info, 7.5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (22)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Feshbach Resonances in Ultracold Gases
• The physics of dipolar bosonic quantum gases
• Light-induced gauge fields for ultracold atoms
• A Strongly Dipolar Bose-Einstein Condensate of Dysprosium
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• Reaching Fermi degeneracy via universal dipolar scattering
• Observation of p-wave Threshold Law Using Evaporatively Cooled Fermionic Atoms
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• Dipolar Relaxation in an ultra-cold Gas of magnetically trapped chromium atoms
• Quasi-Universal Dipolar Scattering in Cold and Ultracold Gases
• Synthetic Gauge Field with Highly Magnetic Lanthanide Atoms
• Control of dipolar relaxation in external fields
• Damagnetization cooling of a gas
• Ferro-Nematic ground state of the dilute dipolar Fermi gas
• Spectroscopy of a narrow-line laser cooling transition in atomic dysprosium
• Searching for Non-Abelian Phases in the Bose-Einstein Condensate of Dysprosium
• Anisotropy in the Interaction of Ultracold Dysprosium
• The J-triplet Cooper pairing with magnetic dipolar interactions
• Trapping ultracold gases near cryogenic materials with rapid reconfigurability

Cited by in corpus (29)

• Dipolar physics: A review of experiments with magnetic quantum gases
• Thermalization near integrability in a dipolar quantum Newton's cradle
• Cooling and thermometry of atomic Fermi gases
• A long-lived spin-orbit-coupled degenerate dipolar Fermi gas
• Liquid quantum droplets of ultracold magnetic atoms
• s-wave scattering lengths of the strongly dipolar bosons ${}^{162}$Dy and ${}^{164}$Dy
• Creating quantum many-body scars through topological pumping of a 1D dipolar gas
• Tuning the dipole-dipole interaction in a quantum gas with a rotating magnetic field
• Dynamical spin-orbit coupling of a quantum gas
• Realization of a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas of Dipolar Atoms
• Quantum Quenches in the Luttinger model and its close relatives
• Bose-Einstein condensation of 162Dy and 160Dy
• Anisotropic expansion of a thermal dipolar Bose gas
• Striped Ferronematic ground states in a spin-orbit coupled $S=1$ Bose gas
• Optical cooling and trapping of highly magnetic atoms: The benefits of a spontaneous spin polarization
• Anisotropic optical trapping as a manifestation of the complex electronic structure of ultracold lanthanide atoms: the example of holmium
• Laser Cooling of Transition Metal Atoms
• Proposal for laser-cooling of rare-earth ions
• Tuneable defect interactions and supersolidity in dipolar quantum gases on a lattice potential
• Production and stabilization of a spin mixture of ultracold dipolar Bose gases
• Interaction-driven Lifshitz transition with dipolar fermions in optical lattices
• Physical dipoles and second order perturbation theory for dipolar fermions in two dimensions
• Bilayer fractional quantum Hall states with ultracold dysprosium
• Chiral edge dynamics and quantum Hall physics in synthetic dimensions with an atomic erbium Bose-Einstein condensate
• Can the dipolar interaction suppress dipolar relaxation?
• Ground state of an ultracold Fermi gas of tilted dipoles in elongated traps
• Second-order interaction corrections to the Fermi surface and the quasiparticle properties of dipolar fermions in three dimensions
• The effect of anisotropic exchange interactions and short-range phenomena on superfluidity in a homogeneous dipolar Fermi gas
• Factor of 1000 suppression of the depolarization rate in ultracold thulium collisions