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Optically Trapped Gas Offers Superconductivity Test Bed

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According to researchers at Duke University in Durham, N.C., optically trapped atomic Fermi gases with magnetically tunable strong interactions have the potential to form the basis of a desktop laboratory for testing nonperturbative theories in systems ranging from superconductors to neutron stars. In research detailed in the Nov. 7 edition of Science, they cooled a fermionic gas of 6Li atoms to degeneracy in an optical trap by applying a 910-G magnetic field. This induced strong interactions that reportedly exhibit behavior universal to all fermionic systems.

Using forced evaporation in the optical trap, the scientists cooled 1.5 x 105 atoms to a temperature of less than 1.5 µK in 3.5 s. The final temperature is low compared with the Fermi temperature of 8 µK, at which degeneracy first occurs. Release from the cigar-shaped optical trap produces anisotropic expansion that recent predictions indicate is a signature of superfluidity, where the Fermi gas becomes an analog of a high-temperature superconductor.
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Published: December 2002
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