Tunneling transport of strongly interacting Fermi gases across the superfluid transition

ORAL

Abstract

Tunneling transport measurements provide a powerful tool to unveil both the coherence properties of a many-body system, through the celebrated Josephson effect, and the role of excitations in its conduction dynamics.Here I present our results in probing condensation of strongly interacting fermionic superfluids, by injecting controlled currents in an ultracold atom two-reservoirs system weakly-coupled through a tunable tunneling barrier. In the absence of any applied chemical potential difference, we directly measure Josephson supercurrents, that depend sinusoidally on the relative phase. By comparing the measured Josephson critical current throughout the BEC-BCS crossover with an analytic model, we extract the condensed fraction of fermionic superfluids.Moreover, we characterize the operation of an atomic junction at unitarity across the superfluid transition. We find Josephson supercurrents to vanish when approaching the critical temperature due to condensate depletion. Remarkably, we observe the condensate to contribute also to resistive currents. In contrast with superconducting junctions, we detect a large anomalous normal conductance at low temperature, arising from the coherent coupling between the condensate and Bogoliubov-Anderson phonons.Our work highlights the key role of transport measurements to disclose the nature of quantum materials.

*European Research Council GA no. 307032 QuFerm2D, and no. 637738 PoLiChroM, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze project QuSim2D 2016.0770, the Italian MIUR under the PRIN2017 project CEnTraL, and EU's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Qombs project FET Flagship on Quan- tum Technologies GA no. 820419, and Marie Skłodowska- Curie GAs no. 705269 and no. 843303.

Publication: W. J. Kwon, G. Del Pace, R. Panza, M. Inguscio, W. Zwerger, M. Zaccanti, F. Scazza and G. Roati, 'Strongly correlated superfluid order parameters from dc Josephson supercurrents', Science, 369, 6499 (2020).

G. Del Pace, W. J. Kwon, M. Zaccanti, G. Roati and F. Scazza, 'Tunneling transport of unitary fermions across the superfluid transition', Physical Review Letters, 126.5, p.055301 (2021).

Presenters

  • Giulia Del Pace

    • CNR-INO and LENS

Authors

  • Giulia Del Pace

    • CNR-INO and LENS
  • Woo Jin Kwon

    • CNR-INO and LENS
  • Francesco Scazza

    • CNR-INO and LENS
  • Giacomo Roati

    • CNR-INO and LENS
    • Istituto Nazionale di Ottica del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR-INO), LENS and Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Universita di Firenze, 50019, Sesto Fiorentino
  • Massimo Inguscio

    • CNR-INO, LENS and Campus Biomedico University of Rome
    • CNR-INO and Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome
    • CNR-INO and LENS,Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome
  • Matteo Zaccanti

    • CNR-INO and LENS