Fermionic Many-Body States Under the Microscope

POSTER

Abstract

We demonstrate the site-resolved observation of two component, fermionic Mott insulators, band insulators and metals of ultracold $^6$Li in a single layer of a three-dimensional optical lattice. Site-resolved imaging enables measurements of local observables, including the local occupation variance. A comparison with predictions of the high temperature series expansion of the Fermi-Hubbard model is consistent with thermally equilibrated samples, with local entropies as low as $0.7k_{\mathrm{B}}$ per particle in the Mott insulator, and $0.5k_{\mathrm{B}}$ per particle in the band insulator. The phase diagram in the Mott regime is studied, exploiting the fact that the underlying harmonic potential enables measurements across a wide range of chemical potentials in a single experimental shot. Our experiments provide a starting point for implementing entropy redistribution based cooling schemes. Furthermore, we report on our recent progress towards measuring site-resolved spin correlations for low temperature samples, opening the door for studying many-body systems in theoretically intractable regimes.

Authors

  • Anton Mazurenko

    • Harvard University

  • Daniel Greif

    • Harvard University

  • Maxwell F. Parsons

    • Harvard University

  • Christie Chiu

    • Harvard University

  • Sebastian Blatt

    • Harvard University
    • Max-Planck-Institut f{\"u}r Quantenoptik, Hans-Kopfermann-Stra{\ss}e 1, 85784 Garching, Germany

  • Florian Huber

    • Harvard University

  • Geoffrey Ji

    • Harvard University

  • Markus Greiner

    • Harvard University
    • Harvard University, Physics Department