Berlin 2014 – scientific programme
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 63: Quantum gases: Lattices III
Q 63.8: Talk
Friday, March 21, 2014, 15:45–16:00, UDL HS2002
Towards a Quantum Gas Microscope for Ultracold Fermions — •Thomas Lompe, Lawrence Cheuk, Melih Okan, Matthew Nichols, and Martin Zwierlein — Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In the past decade ultracold atoms in optical lattices have been established as an ideal model system to study quantum many body physics in a clean and well-controlled environment. Recently, experiments at Harvard and MPQ Munich using bosonic 87Rb atoms have made these systems even more powerful by demonstrating the ability to observe and address atoms in optical lattices with single site resolution.
The goal of our experiment is to achieve such single-site resolution for a quantum gas of fermionic atoms. Such local probing would reveal microscopic density or spin correlations which are difficult to extract from bulk measurements. This technique could for example be used to directly observe antiferromagnetic ordering in a fermionic Mott insulator. The ability to locally address and probe the system could also be used to create and detect sharply localized quantum states such as edge states at the boundary of topological states of matter.
As the starting point for our experiments we cool fermionic potassium atoms with bosonic sodium as a sympathetic coolant. The atoms are then magnetically transported to an optical trap located ten microns below a solid immersion microscope for high-resolution imaging. In this talk we give a description of our experimental setup and report on our progress towards performing fluorescence imaging of 40K atoms trapped in a deep optical lattice.