Heidelberg 2015 – scientific programme
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 4: Quantum Gases: Fermions I
Q 4.6: Talk
Monday, March 23, 2015, 12:45–13:00, K/HS2
Towards single-site resolved imaging of 40K in an optical lattice — •Thomas Lompe, Lawrence Cheuk, Matthew Nichols, Melih Okan, and Martin Zwierlein — Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ultracold atoms in optical lattices are an ideal 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 established the ability to locally probe and manipulate such systems with single site resolution.
The goal of our experiment is to achieve such single-site resolution for a quantum gas of fermionic atoms. This would allow to directly observe microscopic density or spin correlations which are difficult to extract from bulk measurements. This technique could for example be used to directly observe magnetic 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 prepare a 2D Fermi gas trapped in a single node of an optical standing wave seven micrometers below a solid immersion microscope. We then freeze the distribution of the atoms by ramping up a deep 3D optical lattice and use Raman sideband cooling to perform fluorescence imaging. In this talk we will report on our progress towards using this scheme to achieve single-site resolved imaging of fermionic atoms in an optical lattice.