0000000000459468
AUTHOR
B. Paredes
AN OPTICAL PLAQUETTE: MINIMUM EXPRESSIONS OF TOPOLOGICAL MATTER
Topological matter is an unconventional form of matter: it exhibits a global hidden order which is not associated with the spontaneous breaking of any symmetry. The defects of this exotic type of order are anyons, quasiparticles with fractional statistics. Moreover, when living on a surface with non-trivial topology, like a plane with a hole or a torus, this type of matter develops a number of degenerate states which are locally indistinguishable and could be used to build a quantum memory naturally resistant to errors. Except for the fractional quantum Hall effect there is no experimental evidence as to the existence of topologically ordered phases, and it remains a huge challenge to devel…
Free fermion antibunching in a degenerate atomic Fermi gas released from an optical lattice
Noise in a quantum system is fundamentally governed by the statistics and the many-body state of the underlying particles. Whereas for bosonic particles the correlated noise observed for e.g. photons or bosonic neutral atoms can still be explained within a classical field description with fluctuating phases, the anticorrelations in the detection of fermionic particles have no classical analogue. The observation of such fermionic antibunching is so far scarce and has been confined to electrons and neutrons. Here we report on the first direct observation of antibunching of neutral fermionic atoms. Through an analysis of the atomic shot noise in a set of standard absorption images, of a gas of…
Anomalous Expansion of Attractively Interacting Fermionic Atoms in an Optical Lattice
Strong correlations can dramatically modify the thermodynamics of a quantum many-particle system. Especially intriguing behaviour can appear when the system adiabatically enters a strongly correlated regime, for the interplay between entropy and strong interactions can lead to counterintuitive effects. A well known example is the so-called Pomeranchuk effect, occurring when liquid 3He is adiabatically compressed towards its crystalline phase. Here, we report on a novel anomalous, isentropic effect in a spin mixture of attractively interacting fermionic atoms in an optical lattice. As we adiabatically increase the attraction between the atoms we observe that the gas, instead of contracting, …