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Poster Session

Poster Session III

4:00 pm – 6:00 pm, Thursday June 19 Session S00 Oregon Convention Center:, Exhibit Hall E
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First Sound Damping in the Imbalanced Unitary Fermi Gas

Poster 92
Presenter: Eric Wolf (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Authors: Huan Bui (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Martin Zwierlein (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

The behavior of strongly-interacting spin-imbalanced Fermi systems is essential to an understanding of magnetized electrons or isospin-imbalanced nuclear matter, and these systems are also expected to exhibit exotic phases, such as Fulde-Farrell-Larkin-Ovechnikov superfluidity. Ultracold neutral atomic gas platforms allow a clean, highly tunable implementation of such systems, with the added advantage that the microscopic interactions are well understood. 

We prepare a degenerate spin mixture of fermionic 6Li in a homogeneous blue-detuned box potential, with s-wave interactions between spin components tuned to unitarity via a Feshbach resonance. We measure resonances of density waves - first sound - in this box potential, extracting the first sound diffusivity as a proxy for momentum and heat transfer in the liquid. We observe a dramatic increase in diffusivity with increasing imbalance, as well as signatures of non-monotonicity with temperature at high imbalance, in qualitative agreement with Fermi liquid theory. 

Funding acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. EW is supported by an NDSEG fellowship from the US ARO.

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