Controllable Production of Degenerate Fermi Gases of $^6$Li Atoms in the 2D-3D Crossover

TL;DR

This paper introduces a technique to precisely control the band occupation in a 3D Fermi gas transferred into a 1D optical lattice, enabling systematic exploration of many-body physics across dimensional regimes.

Contribution

It presents a method to quantitatively tune the atom occupation ratio of lattice bands by adjusting trapping potentials, facilitating studies of dimensional effects in Fermi gases.

Findings

Achieved tuning of band occupation from 100% to 50% in a Fermi gas.

Demonstrated control over the dimensional crossover in cold atom experiments.

Provided a new experimental route to study many-body interactions across dimensions.

Abstract

The many-body physics in the dimensional crossover regime attracts much attention in cold atom experiments, but yet to explore systematically. One of the technical difficulties existed in the experiments is the lack of the experimental technique to quantitatively tune the atom occupation ratio of the different lattice bands. In this letter, we report such techniques in a process of transferring a 3D Fermi gas into a 1D optical lattice, where the capability of tuning the occupation of the energy band is realized by varying the trapping potentials of the optical dipole trap (ODT) and the lattice, respectively. We could tune a Fermi gas with the occupation in the lowest band from unity to 50$\%$ quantitatively. This provides a route to experimentally study the dependence of many-body interaction on the dimensionality in a Fermi gas.