All-optical cooling of Fermi gases via Pauli inhibition of spontaneous emission

Abstract

A technique is proposed to cool Fermi gases to the regime of quantum degeneracy based on the expected inhibition of spontaneous emission due to the Pauli principle. The reduction of the linewidth for spontaneous emission originates a corresponding reduction of the Doppler temperature, which under specific conditions may give rise to a runaway process through which fermions are progressively cooled. The approach requires a combination of a magneto-optical trap as a cooling system and an optical dipole trap to enhance quantum degeneracy. This results in expected Fermi degeneracy factors $T/T_F$ comparable to the lowest values recently achieved, with potential for a direct implementation in optical lattices. The experimental demonstration of this technique should also indirectly provide a macroscopic manifestation of the Pauli exclusion principle at the atomic physics level.

References in corpus (5)

• Phase diagram of a two-component Fermi gas with resonant interactions
• Cooling in strongly correlated optical lattices: prospects and challenges
• Precision Measurement of Transition Matrix Elements via Light Shift Cancellation
• Efficient all-optical production of large ${}^6$Li quantum gases using D${}_1$ gray-molasses cooling
• Two-stage magneto-optical trapping and narrow-line cooling of ${}^6$Li atoms to high phase-space density

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Cooling and thermometry of atomic Fermi gases
• Pauli blocking of atomic spontaneous decay
• Pauli blocking of stimulated emission in a degenerate Fermi gas