Conversion of an Atomic Fermi Gas to a Long-Lived Molecular Bose Gas

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the conversion of an ultracold Fermi gas of lithium-6 atoms into a long-lived molecular Bose gas via adiabatic passage through a Feshbach resonance, achieving high efficiency and long confinement times.

Contribution

It presents a method to efficiently produce and trap ultracold molecules from a Fermi gas using adiabatic Feshbach resonance tuning, with long molecule lifetimes.

Findings

Produced approximately 150,000 molecules with 50% efficiency

Molecules remain confined for up to 1 second

Successfully dissociated molecules via reverse sweep

Abstract

We have converted an ultracold Fermi gas of $^6$Li atoms into an ultracold gas of $^6$Li$_2$ molecules by adiabatic passage through a Feshbach resonance. Approximately $1.5 \times 10^5$ molecules in the least-bound, $v = 38$, vibrational level of the X$^1 \Sigma ^+_g$ singlet state are produced with an efficiency of 50%. The molecules remain confined in an optical trap for times of up to 1 s before we dissociate them by a reverse adiabatic sweep.