Speckle Imaging of Spin Fluctuations in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas

ORAL

Abstract

Spin fluctuations and density fluctuations are studied for a two-component gas of strongly interacting fermions along the Bose-Einstein condensate-BCS crossover. This is done by in situ imaging of dispersive speckle patterns. Compressibility and magnetic susceptibility are determined from the measured fluctuations through the Fluctuation-Dissipation theorem. This new sensitive method easily resolves a tenfold suppression of spin fluctuations below shot noise due to pairing, and can be applied to novel magnetic phases in optical lattices.

*This work was supported by NSF and the Office of Naval Research, AFOSR (through the MURI program), and under Army Research Office Grant No. W911NF-07-1-0493 with funds from the DARPA Optical Lattice Emulator program.

Authors

  • Wujie Huang

    • MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, and Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Christian Sanner

    • MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, and Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Edward J. Su

    • MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, and Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Aviv Keshet

    • MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, and Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Jonathon Gillen

    • MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, and Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Ralf Gommers

    • MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, and Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Wolfgang Ketterle

    • MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, and Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology