Controllable production of degenerate Fermi gases of Li6 atoms in the crossover from two dimensions to three dimensions

Abstract

Many-body physics in dimensional crossover systems has attracted much attention, but is yet to explore intensively. Cold atoms provide an excellent experimental platform to address the questions in this area, but technical difficulties still exist. When an optical lattice is applied to tune the dimensionality of trapped cold atoms, it is usually difficult to precisely tune the occupation ratio of the atom in the different lattice bands. In this paper we report the method to tune the occupation ratio of the energy band when transferring a three-dimensional Fermi gas into a one-dimensional optical lattice, where we could tune the occupation ratio in the lowest band from unity to $50%$ quantitatively by jointly varying the trapping potentials of the optical dipole trap and the one-dimensional lattice. This method provides a route to study the dependence of the many-body interaction on the dimensionality by continuously changing the dimensionality of a Fermi gas in the crossover from two dimensions to three dimensions.