Cavity-assisted preparation and detection of a unitary Fermi gas

Abstract

We report on the fast production and weakly destructive detection of a Fermi gas with tunable interactions in a high finesse cavity. The cavity is used both with far off-resonant light to create a deep optical dipole trap, and with near-resonant light to reach the strong light-matter coupling regime. The cavity-based dipole trap allows for an efficient capture of laser-cooled atoms, and the use of a lattice-cancellation scheme makes it possible to perform efficient intra-cavity evaporative cooling. After transfer in a crossed optical dipole trap, we produce deeply degenerate unitary Fermi gases with up to $7\cdot 10^5$ atoms inside the cavity, with an overall $2.85$ s long sequence. The cavity is then probed with near-resonant light to perform five hundred-times repeated, dispersive measurements of the population of individual clouds, allowing for weakly destructive observations of slow atom-number variations over a single sample. This platform will make possible the real-time observation of transport and dynamics as well as the study of driven-dissipative, strongly correlated quantum matter.

22 pages, 11 figures

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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Cavity QED with Quantum Gases: New Paradigms in Many-Body Physics
• Density-wave ordering in a unitary Fermi gas with photon-mediated interactions
• Universal pair-polaritons in a strongly interacting Fermi gas
• Multimode-polariton superradiance via Floquet engineering
• Spin Entanglement and Magnetic Competition via Long-range Interactions in Spinor Quantum Optical Lattices
• Optomechanical Response of a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas
• Loading atoms from a large magnetic trap to a small intra-cavity dipole trap
• Vibration damping platform for cavity quantum-electrodynamics experiments
• Direct production of fermionic superfluids in a cavity-enhanced optical dipole trap
• Cavity-enabled real-time observation of individual atomic collisions
• Many-body localization of one-dimensional degenerate Fermi gases with cavity-assisted non-local quasiperiodic interactions
• Superradiant phase transitions in one-dimensional correlated Fermi gases with cavity-induced umklapp scattering
• Tracking evaporative cooling of a mesoscopic atomic quantum gas in real time
• Microscopy of cavity-induced density-wave ordering in ultracold gases
• Paramagnetic phases of strongly correlated ultracold fermions coupled to an optical cavity