Conversion of a Degenerate Fermi Gas of 6Li Atoms to a Molecular BEC

Abstract

Atomic Feshbach resonances have recently been used to produce a strongly interacting Fermi gas, where the BCS/BEC crossover can be explored. We have used both narrow and broad Feshbach resonances to convert a quantum degenerate Fermi gas of 6Li atoms into an ultracold gas of Li2 molecules. For the narrow resonances, the molecules are formed by coherent adiabatic passage through the resonance. We find that 50% of the atoms are converted to molecules. Furthermore, the lifetime of these molecules was measured to be surprisingly long, 1 s. We will discuss these measurements in the context of the present theoretical understanding. Molecules can also be formed using static fields near the broad Feshbach resonance. The lifetime of these molecules is again long, and sufficient to enable their evaporation to a Bose-Einstein condensate. Phase contrast images of the molecular condensate are presented. The BCS/BEC crossover may be explored by starting with a pure molecular condensate on the low-field side of the Feshbach resonance, and adiabatically changing the field to any final value around resonance. We combine this ability with optical spectroscopy on a bound-bound molecular transition to probe the nature of the many-body wavefunction in the crossover regime.