Düsseldorf 2007 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 56: Quantengase (Fermionen und Gemische)

Q 56.7: Talk

Thursday, March 22, 2007, 15:30–15:45, 6J

Bose-Fermi Mixtures in a Three-Dimensional Optical Lattice — •Kenneth Günter, Thilo Stöferle, Henning Moritz, Michael Köhl, and Tilman Esslinger — Institute of Quantum Electronics, ETH Zürich, CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland

Optical lattices allow to enter the strongly correlated regime of ultracold bosons or fermions. A mixture of both species interconnects two systems of fundamentally different quantum statistics, and interesting phenomena such as the existence of polarons or a phase transition to a supersolid phase are expected.

We have studied mixtures of fermionic ⁴⁰K and bosonic ⁸⁷Rb quantum gases in a three-dimensional optical lattice. We observe that an increasing admixture of the fermionic species diminishes the phase coherence of the bosonic atoms as measured by studying both the visibility of the matter wave interference pattern and the coherence length of the bosons. Moreover, we find that the attractive interactions between bosons and fermions lead to an increase of the boson density in the lattice which we measure by studying three-body recombination in the lattice.