Measurement of the Dynamical Structure Factor of a 1D Interacting Fermi Gas

Abstract

We present measurements of the dynamical structure factor $S(q,\omega )$ of an interacting one-dimensional (1D) Fermi gas for small excitation energies. We use the two lowest hyperfine levels of the ${}^6$Li atom to form a pseudo-spin-1/2 system whose s-wave interactions are tunable via a Feshbach resonance. The atoms are confined to 1D by a two-dimensional optical lattice. Bragg spectroscopy is used to measure a response of the gas to density ("charge") mode excitations at a momentum $q$ and frequency $\omega$. The spectrum is obtained by varying $\omega$, while the angle between two laser beams determines $q$, which is fixed to be less than the Fermi momentum $k_{\text{F}}$. The measurements agree well with Tomonaga-Luttinger theory.