Production of a highly degenerate Fermi gas of metastable helium-3 atoms

Abstract

We report on the achievement of quantum degeneracy in both components of a Bose-Fermi mixture of metastable helium atoms, ${}^4$He* and ${}^3$He*. Degeneracy is achieved via Doppler cooling and forced evaporation for ${}^4$He*, and sympathetically cooling ${}^3$He* with ${}^4$He*. We discuss our simplified implementation, along with the high versatility of our system. This technique is able to produce a degenerate Fermi gas with a minimum reduced temperature of $T/T_F=0.14(1)$, consisting of $2.5\times 10^4$ ${}^3$He* atoms. Due to the high internal energy of both isotopes single atom detection is possible, opening the possibility of a large number of experiments into Bose-Fermi mixtures.

13 pages, 8 figures

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Emergent s-wave interactions between identical fermions in quasi-one-dimensional geometries
• $n$-body anti-bunching in a degenerate Fermi gas of ${}^3$He* atoms
• Measurement of the $s$-wave scattering length between metastable helium isotopes
• Quantum science with arrays of metastable helium-3 atoms
• Proposal for a Bell Test with Entangled Atoms of Different Mass
• Pulse Breathing Dynamics in a Mode-Locked Laser measured via SHG autocorrelation