The stability and free expansion of a dipolar Fermi gas

TL;DR

This paper studies the stability and expansion behavior of a dipolar Fermi gas, revealing challenges in stabilization and characteristic deformation patterns during free expansion due to dipolar interactions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that trap geometry tuning is ineffective for stabilization and highlights observable deformation in momentum distribution upon switching off interactions.

Findings

Stabilization via trap geometry is generally inefficient.

Density profile stretches along the attractive dipolar direction.

Deformation of momentum distribution is observable when interactions are switched off.

Abstract

We investigate the stability and the free expansion of a trapped dipolar Fermi gas. We show that stabilizing the system relying on tuning the trap geometry is generally inefficient. We further show that the expanded density profile always gets stretched along the attractive direction of dipolar interaction. We also point out that by switching off the dipolar interaction simultaneously with the trapping potential, the deformation of momentum distribution can be directly observed.