Two-body Loss in a Fermi Gas Near a P-Wave Feshbach Resonance

Open Access
- Author:
- Ismail, Arif Mawardi
- Graduate Program:
- Physics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- December 03, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Kenneth O'Hara, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Kenneth O'Hara, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Committee Member, Committee Member
Eric Hudson, Committee Member
Leonid Berlyand, Outside Member - Keywords:
- ultracold Fermi gas
p-wave
dipolar relazation
quasi-1D quantum gas
6Li - Abstract:
- Ultracold Fermi gases with resonantly enhanced p-wave interactions potentially offer a highly controllable platform to study exotic superfluid pairing. However, large inelastic loss has been observed when p-wave interactions are resonantly enhanced, which has prevented the attainment of p-wave superfluidity. In this thesis, I present our experimental studies of inelastic two-body loss in an ultracold Fermi gas of 6Li atoms when p-wave interactions are enhanced by a Feshbach resonance. Recently, it has been theoretically predicted that, in reduced dimensions, the two-body inelastic loss rate constant near a p-wave Feshbach resonance is reduced compared to the 3D case. Motivated by this work, we experimentally measured the two-body loss rate constants in 3D and quasi-1D. Two cases were considered, namely a spin mixture of the two energetically lowest hyperfine states, and a spin-polarized gas of atoms in the first excited hyperfine state. In the case of the spin mixture, we did not observe any reduction of the rate constant in quasi-1D compared to the 3D case. For the spin-polarized case, we observed a modest reduction of the quasi-1D rate constant compared to the 3D case. However, the observed reduction is still a factor of five smaller than the predicted suppression of the rate constant. Nevertheless, in quasi-1D, for both cases, we observed a reduction of the actual loss rate, which we attribute to the buildup of dissipation-induced correlations. This observation has not been previously predicted. It may open a promising path toward realizing a quasi-1D Fermi gas with strong p-wave interactions, which is predicted to exhibit many intriguing many-body quantum phases.