Measuring the Speed of Sound in a 1D Fermi Gas

We report measurements of the speed of sound in a two-spin component, 1D gas of fermionic lithium. The 1D system is an array of one-dimensional tubes created by a 2D optical lattice. By increasing the lattice depth, the tunneling between tubes is sufficiently small to make each an independent 1D system. To measure the speed of sound, we create a density notch at the center of the atom cloud using a sheet of light tuned far from resonance. The dipole force felt by both spin states will be equivalent, so this notch can be thought of as a charge excitation \footnote{A. Recati, P. O. Fedichev, W. Zwerger, and P. Zoller, \textbf{Phys. Rev. Lett} 90, 020401 (2003).}. Once this beam is turned off, the notch propagates to the edge of the atomic cloud with a velocity that depends on the strength of interatomic interactions. We control interactions using a magnetically tuned Feshbach resonance, allowing us to measure the speed of sound over a wide range of interaction. This method may be used to extract the Luttinger parameter vs. interaction strength.