SUT team gain spotlight for Fermi Gas publication

16 August 2010

The SUT ACQAO team's work on 'Universal behavior of pair correlations in a strongly interacting Fermi Gas', recently published in Phys. Rev. Lett 105, 070402, has gained interest from the physics community with a commentary in the American Physical Societies "Physics" websites.

They have show that short-range pair correlations in a strongly interacting Fermi gas follow a simple universal law described by Tan’s relations. This was achieved through measurements of the static structure factor which displays a universal scaling proportional to the ratio of Tan’s contact to the momentum C/q. Bragg spectroscopy of ultracold 6Li atoms from a periodic optical potential was used to measure the structure factor for a wide range of momenta and interaction strengths, providing broad confirmation of this universal law. They calibrated their Bragg spectra using the f-sum rule, which was found to improve the accuracy of the structure factor measurement.