Abstract
We report on the fast production and weakly destructive detection of a Fermi gas with tunable interactions in a high finesse cavity. The cavity is used both with far off-resonant light to create a deep optical dipole trap, and with near-resonant light to reach the strong light–matter coupling regime. The cavity-based dipole trap allows for an efficient capture of laser-cooled atoms, and the use of a lattice-cancellation scheme makes it possible to perform efficient intra-cavity evaporative cooling. After transfer in a crossed optical dipole trap, we produce deeply degenerate unitary Fermi gases with up to 7 × 105 atoms inside the cavity, with an overall 2.85 s long sequence. The cavity is then probed with near-resonant light to perform five hundred-times repeated, dispersive measurements of the population of individual clouds, allowing for weakly destructive observations of slow atom-number variations over a single sample. This platform will make possible the real-time observation of transport and dynamics as well as the study of driven-dissipative, strongly correlated quantum matter.
Highlights
A low-temperature gas of interacting fermions is one of the most complex quantum systems
We report on the fast production and weakly destructive detection of a Fermi gas with tunable interactions in a high finesse cavity
We have presented an apparatus combining unitary Fermi gases with a high finesse optical cavity
Summary
A low-temperature gas of interacting fermions is one of the most complex quantum systems. We present a novel experimental setup which combines a high-finesse cavity and a strongly interacting Fermi gas of 6Li. In particular we present how the same cavity is used both at the preparation and detection stages. To illustrate the potential of the cavity as a detection tool for Fermi gases, we perform repeated, weakly destructive measurements of the time evolution of the number of atoms in an individual cloud. We demonstrate that 100 measurements repeated over 1 s can be performed on a single cloud while maintaining the temperature below the superfluid transition, with limited atom losses. This represents a key milestone towards quantum-limited transport measurements, for example in a two-terminal configuration [7, 32].
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