Seminarium Optyczne

I will present the new experimental machine at LENS to study strongly-correlated fermionic 6Li atoms. We have recently demonstrated a gray molasses scheme operating on the D1 atomic transition to produce degenerate quantum gases of 6Li with a large number of atoms.Thanks to this novel sub-Doppler cooling phase we lower the initial temperature of 109 atoms from 500 to 40 μK. By evaporating two-state spin mixtures into an optical trap, we produce molecular Bose-Einstein condensates of up to 5×105 molecules and weakly-interacting degenerate Fermi gases of 7×105 atoms at T=TF < 0.1. We are currently superimposing on the quantum gases a thin optical barrier whose size σ≃1.5 μm is comparable with the mean inter-particle distance. I will discuss on the different regimes that we plan to study in thisconfiguration, going from the itinerant ferromagnetic phases to the observation of Josephson-like tunneling of fermionic pairs.