8 research outputs found
Sound propagation and quantum limited damping in a two-dimensional Fermi gas
Strongly interacting two-dimensional Fermi systems are one of the great
remaining challenges in many-body physics due to the interplay of strong local
correlations and enhanced long-range fluctuations. Here, we probe the
thermodynamic and transport properties of a 2D Fermi gas across the BEC-BCS
crossover by studying the propagation and damping of sound modes. We excite
particle currents by imprinting a phase step onto homogeneous Fermi gases
trapped in a box potential and extract the speed of sound from the frequency of
the resulting density oscillations. We measure the speed of sound across the
BEC-BCS crossover and compare the resulting dynamic measurement of the equation
of state both to a static measurement based on recording density profiles and
to Quantum Monte Carlo calculations and find reasonable agreement between all
three. We also measure the damping of the sound mode, which is determined by
the shear and bulk viscosities as well as the thermal conductivity of the gas.
We find that the damping is minimal in the strongly interacting regime and the
diffusivity approaches the universal quantum bound of a perfect
fluid
Excitation Spectrum and Superfluid Gap of an Ultracold Fermi Gas
Funding Information: We thank R. Haussmann, L. Mathey, C. Vale, and W. Zwerger for helpful discussions and R. Haussmann, W. Zwerger, and P. Pieri for providing us with the results of their calculations. This work is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) in the framework of SFB-925, Project No. 170620586, and the excellence cluster Advanced Imaging of Matter, EXC 2056, Project ID No. 390715994. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 American Physical Society.Ultracold atomic gases are a powerful tool to experimentally study strongly correlated quantum many-body systems. In particular, ultracold Fermi gases with tunable interactions have allowed to realize the famous BEC-BCS crossover from a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of molecules to a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid of weakly bound Cooper pairs. However, large parts of the excitation spectrum of fermionic superfluids in the BEC-BCS crossover are still unexplored. In this work, we use Bragg spectroscopy to measure the full momentum-resolved low-energy excitation spectrum of strongly interacting ultracold Fermi gases. This enables us to directly observe the smooth transformation from a bosonic to a fermionic superfluid that takes place in the BEC-BCS crossover. We also use our spectra to determine the evolution of the superfluid gap and find excellent agreement with previous experiments and self-consistent T-matrix calculations both in the BEC and crossover regime. However, toward the BCS regime a calculation that includes the effects of particle-hole correlations shows better agreement with our data.Peer reviewe