Collisional relaxation in a fermionic gas

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to measure the temperature of a trapped fermionic gas by analyzing how a test particle's motion relaxes, revealing the effects of Fermi-Dirac statistics on relaxation rates.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to determine the degeneracy and temperature of a fermionic gas via relaxation dynamics of a test particle.

Findings

Relaxation rate decreases significantly in the degenerate regime.

The method allows direct temperature measurement of the fermionic gas.

Fermi-Dirac statistics strongly influence relaxation behavior.

Abstract

We propose a method to study the degeneracy of a trapped atomic gas of fermions through the relaxation of the motion of a test particle. In the degenerate regime, and for an energy of the test particle well below the Fermi energy, we show that the Fermi-Dirac statistics is responsible for a strong decrease of the relaxation rate. This method can be used to directly measure the temperature of the fermionic gas.