A Degenerate Bose-Fermi Mixture of Metastable Atoms

Abstract

We report the observation of simultaneous quantum degeneracy in a dilute gaseous Bose-Fermi mixture of metastable atoms. Sympathetic cooling of helium-3 (fermion) by helium-4 (boson), both in the lowest triplet state, allows us to produce ensembles containing more than 10^6 atoms of each isotope at temperatures below 1 micro-Kelvin, and achieve a fermionic degeneracy parameter of T/Tf=0.45. Due to their high internal energy, the detection of individual metastable atoms with sub-nanosecond time resolution is possible, permitting the study of bosonic and fermionic quantum gases with unprecedented precision. This may lead to metastable helium becoming the mainstay of quantum atom optics.

4 pages, 3 figures submitted to PRL

References in corpus (3)

• Vortices and Superfluidity in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas
• Limits on Universality in Ultracold Three-Boson Recombination
• Homonuclear ionizing collisions of laser-cooled metastable helium atoms

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