Experimental setup for the production of ultracold strongly correlated fermionic superfluids of $^{6}$Li

TL;DR

This paper details an experimental setup for creating ultracold fermionic superfluids of $^6$Li atoms, enabling exploration of the BEC-BCS crossover in strongly correlated quantum gases.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental configuration capable of producing and tuning ultracold $^6$Li superfluids across different interaction regimes.

Findings

Achieved quantum degeneracy at $T/T_F=0.1$ with up to $5 imes 10^4$ atomic pairs.

Successfully accessed superfluid regimes near a broad Feshbach resonance.

Enabled exploration of the BEC-BCS crossover in ultracold fermionic gases.

Abstract

We present our experimental setup to produce ultracold strongly correlated fermionic superfluids made of a two-component spin-mixture of $^6$Li atoms. Employing standard cooling techniques, we achieve quantum degeneracy in a single-beam optical dipole trap. Our setup is capable of generating spin-balanced samples at temperatures as low as $T/T_F = 0.1$ containing up to $5 \times 10^4$ atomic pairs. We can access different superfluid regimes by tuning the interparticle interactions close to a broad magnetic Feshbach resonance. In particular, we are able to explore the crossover from the molecular Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid regimes.