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.
Modugno
Giovanni
G
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
Roati
Giacomo
G
Riboli
Francesco
F
Ferlaino
Francesca
F
Brecha
Robert J
RJ
Inguscio
Massimo
M