4 DECEMBER 2003 | Markus Greiner, Cindy A. Regal, & Deborah S. Jin
The article describes the experimental observation of a molecular Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) in an ultracold Fermi gas of atoms. The researchers start with a Fermi gas of fermionic atoms, evaporatively cooled to a high degree of quantum degeneracy, and create molecules by adiabatically sweeping a magnetic field across a Feshbach resonance. This process converts most of the fermionic atoms into bosonic molecules, which are then observed to form a BEC through a bimodal momentum distribution. The experiment demonstrates the crossover between BCS-type superfluidity and the BEC limit, providing a direct realization of the predicted BCS–BEC continuum. The molecular BEC is characterized by a significant condensate fraction and a low temperature, and the interaction strength is varied to study the system's properties. The results support the theoretical predictions and open up new avenues for studying the crossover regime between BCS-type superfluidity and BEC.The article describes the experimental observation of a molecular Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) in an ultracold Fermi gas of atoms. The researchers start with a Fermi gas of fermionic atoms, evaporatively cooled to a high degree of quantum degeneracy, and create molecules by adiabatically sweeping a magnetic field across a Feshbach resonance. This process converts most of the fermionic atoms into bosonic molecules, which are then observed to form a BEC through a bimodal momentum distribution. The experiment demonstrates the crossover between BCS-type superfluidity and the BEC limit, providing a direct realization of the predicted BCS–BEC continuum. The molecular BEC is characterized by a significant condensate fraction and a low temperature, and the interaction strength is varied to study the system's properties. The results support the theoretical predictions and open up new avenues for studying the crossover regime between BCS-type superfluidity and BEC.