Direct production of fermionic superfluids in a cavity-enhanced optical dipole trap

Abstract

We present the production of quantum degenerate, superfluid gases of ${}^6$Li through direct evaporative cooling in a cavity-enhanced optical dipole trap. The entire evaporative cooling process is performed in a trap created by the TEM${}_{00}$ mode of a Fabry-Pérot cavity, simultaneously driven on several successive longitudinal modes. This leads to near-complete cancellation of the inherent lattice structure along the axial direction of the cavity, as evidenced by the observation of long-lived dipole oscillations of the atomic cloud. We demonstrate the production of molecular Bose-Einstein condensates upon adiabatic conversion of a unitary Fermi gas evaporatively cooled in this trap. The lifetime and heating in the cavity trap are similar to those in a running wave dipole trap. Our system enables the optical production of ultracold samples using a total trap-laser power below $1$ W, leveraging the benefits of optical resonators as dipole traps in quantum gas research while maintaining a simple resonator design and minimizing additional experimental complexity.

Submission to SciPost, 11 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Microscopy of cavity-induced density-wave ordering in ultracold gases
• The fate of the Fermi surface coupled to a single-wave-vector cavity mode