Group seminar at MPQ and Zoom: Fermion pairs under the microscope

Martin Zwierlein, MIT Department of Physics
Group seminar at MPQ lecture hall and Zoom
Tuesday, 7 July 2026, 10:00 am (CEST)

Strongly interacting atomic Fermi gases allow the realization of superfluids with the highest critical temperature at given density. Their physics connects to strong-coupling superconductors, neutron matter and the quark-gluon plasma of the Early Universe. For a microscopic view into these gases, we recently realized a continuum gas microscope for bosonic and fermionic atoms, featuring spin resolution for the fermions. Applied to a 2D Fermi gas with attractive interactions, the single-atom and spin-resolved images directly reveal fermion pairing and the contact, a crucial quantity governing short-range correlations and thermodynamics. Fourier transforming the images yield the density and spin structure factor, revealing sound and pseudo-gap behavior. Our technique is general and can be applied in the future also to e.g. dipolar atomic or molecular gases.