Degenerate Fermi gas in a combined harmonic-lattice potential

Abstract

In this paper we derive an analytic approximation to the density of states for atoms in a combined optical lattice and harmonic trap potential as used in current experiments with quantum degenerate gases. We compare this analytic density of states to numerical solutions and demonstrate its validity regime. Our work explicitly considers the role of higher bands and when they are important in quantitative analysis of this system. Applying our density of states to a degenerate Fermi gas we consider how adiabatic loading from a harmonic trap into the combined harmonic-lattice potential affects the degeneracy temperature. Our results suggest that occupation of excited bands during loading should lead to more favourable conditions for realizing degenerate Fermi gases in optical lattices.

11 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Localization of bosonic atoms by fermionic impurities in a 3d optical lattice
• Molecules of Fermionic Atoms in an Optical Lattice
• Non-equilibrium Gross-Pitaevskii dynamics of boson lattice models
• Quantum Monte Carlo study of confined fermions in one-dimensional optical lattices
• Single-atom density of states of an optical lattice
• Adiabatic cooling of Fermions in an optical lattice
• Thermodynamics of quantum degenerate gases in optical lattices

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Cooling in strongly correlated optical lattices: prospects and challenges
• Theory of correlations between ultra-cold bosons released from an optical lattice
• Bose-Einstein condensation in an optical lattice
• Finite temperature theory of superfluid bosons in optical lattices
• Emergent s-wave interactions between identical fermions in quasi-one-dimensional geometries
• Adiabatic cooling of a tunable Bose-Fermi mixture in an optical lattice
• State selective cooling of $\mathrm{SU}(N)$ Fermi-gases
• Statistical mechanics of a Feshbach coupled Bose-Fermi gas in an optical lattice