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Absence of heating in a uniform Fermi gas created by periodic driving

ORAL

Abstract

External trapping potentials in ultracold atoms experiments often depend on the atomic spin, which may lead to inhomogeneous broadening, phase separation and decoherence. Dynamical decoupling provides an approach to mitigate these effects by applying an external field that induces rapid spin rotations. However, a continuous periodic driving of a generic interacting many-body system is expected to heat it. We prepare a strongly interacting degenerate Fermi gas in a flat box-like potential by combining a magnetic field gradient with rf driving, which simultaneously counteracts gravitational force for two spin states with different magnetic moments. We find that there is no heating on experimentally relevant timescales for high enough driving frequency, and physical observables are similar to those of a stationary gas. In particular, we measure the pair-condensation fraction of a fermionic superfluid at unitarity and the contact parameter in the BEC-BCS crossover. The condensate fraction exhibits a non-monotonic dependence on the drive frequency and reaches a value higher than its value without driving. The contact agrees with recent theories and calculations for a uniform stationary gas. Our results establish that a strongly-interacting quantum gas can be dynamically decoupled from a spin-dependent potential for long periods of time without modifying its intrinsic many-body behavior.

Publication: 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09506<br>2. The paper describing this work is submitted to PRX

Presenters

  • Constantine Shkedrov

    Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Authors

  • Constantine Shkedrov

    Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

  • Meny Menashes

    Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

  • Gal Ness

    Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

  • Anastasiya Vainbaum

    Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

  • Yoav Sagi

    Technion - Israel Institute of Technology