Time-resolved pairing gap spectroscopy in a quantum simulator of fermionic superfluidity inside an optical cavity

TL;DR

This study employs a quantum simulator with laser-cooled atoms in a cavity to perform time-resolved spectroscopy, revealing properties of pairing gaps in fermionic superfluids and demonstrating the potential for exploring complex many-body quantum states.

Contribution

It introduces a novel cavity QED approach to distinguish and analyze multiple many-body gaps in a fermionic superfluid emulator using nondestructive spectroscopy.

Findings

Identification of BCS and spectral gaps in the system

Dependence of the spectral gap on atomic state populations

Demonstration of nondestructive readout techniques

Abstract

We use an ensemble of laser-cooled strontium atoms in a high-finesse cavity to cleanly emulate the technique of rf spectroscopy employed in studies of BEC-BCS physics in fermionic superfluids of degenerate cold gases. Here, we leverage the multilevel internal structure of the atoms to study the physics of Cooper pair breaking in this system. In doing so, we observe and distinguish the properties of two distinct many-body gaps, the BCS pairing gap and the spectral gap, using nondestructive readout techniques. The latter is found to depend on the populations of the internal atomic states, reflecting the chemical potential dependence predicted in fermionic superfluids. This work opens the path for more fully exploiting the rich internal structure of atoms in cavity QED emulators to study both analogous systems and also more exotic states yet to be realized.