Quantum degenerate Fermi gas in an orbital optical lattice

Abstract

Spin-polarized samples and spin mixtures of quantum degenerate fermionic atoms are prepared in selected excited Bloch bands of an optical chequerboard square lattice. For the spin-polarized case, extreme band lifetimes above $10$s are observed, reflecting the suppression of collisions by Pauli's exclusion principle. For spin mixtures, lifetimes are reduced by an order of magnitude by two-body collisions between different spin components, but still remarkably large values of about one second are found. By analyzing momentum spectra, we can directly observe the orbital character of the optical lattice. The observations demonstrated here form the basis for exploring the physics of Fermi gases with two paired spin components in orbital optical lattices, including the regime of unitarity.

10 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (10)

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• Molecular Probe of Pairing in the BEC-BCS Crossover
• Orbital superfluidity in the $P$-band of a bipartite optical square lattice
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• p-band engineering in artificial electronic lattices

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Ultracold Feshbach molecules in an orbital optical lattice
• Multi-frequency optical lattice for dynamic lattice-geometry control
• Intrinsic Anomalous Hall Effect in a Bosonic Chiral Superfluid
• Experimental realization of a high precision tunable hexagonal optical lattice
• Emergent $s$-wave interactions in orbitally active quasi-two-dimensional Fermi gases
• Intrinsic anomalous Hall effect across the magnetic phase transition of a spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensate
• Controlling higher-orbital quantum phases of ultracold atoms via coupling to optical cavities
• Route towards classical frustration and band flattening via optical lattice distortion
• Efficient shortcuts-to-adiabaticity for loading an ultracold Fermi gas into higher orbital bands of one-dimensional optical lattice