Collapse of a degenerate Fermi gas.
A degenerate gas of identical fermions is brought to collapse by the interaction with a Bose-Einstein condensate. We used an atomic mixture of fermionic potassium-40 and bosonic rubidium-87, in which the strong interspecies attraction leads to an instability above a critical number of particles. The observed phenomenon suggests a direction for manipulating fermion-fermion interactions on the route to superfluidity.
European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy, Università di Firenze, and Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia (INFM), Via Nello Carrara 1, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy. modugno@lens.unifi.it
Giovanni
G
Modugno
Giacomo
G
Roati
Francesco
F
Riboli
Francesca
F
Ferlaino
Robert J
RJ
Brecha
Massimo
M
Inguscio