Suppression of Density Fluctuations in a Quantum Degenerate Fermi Gas

• Main Authors: Sanner, Christian Burkhard (Contributor), Su, Edward Joseph (Contributor), Keshet, Aviv (Contributor), Gommers, Ralf (Contributor), Shin, Yong-il (Contributor), Huang, Wujie (Contributor), Ketterle, Wolfgang (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Physical Society, 2011-01-24T15:48:50Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

We study density profiles of an ideal Fermi gas and observe Pauli suppression of density fluctuations (atom shot noise) for cold clouds deep in the quantum degenerate regime. Strong suppression is observed for probe volumes containing more than 10 000 atoms. Measuring the level of suppression provides sensitive thermometry at low temperatures. After this method of sensitive noise measurements has been validated with an ideal Fermi gas, it can now be applied to characterize phase transitions in strongly correlated many-body systems.
United States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (MURI)
United States. Army Research Office (Grant No. W911NF-07-1-0493)