TY - JOUR
AU - Dylan Young
AU - Eric Song
AU - Anjun Chu
AU - Diego Barberena
AU - Zhijing Niu
AU - Vera Schäfer
AU - Robert Lewis-Swan
AU - Ana Rey
AU - James Thompson
AB - We use an ensemble of laser-cooled strontium atoms in a high-finesse cavity to cleanly emulate the technique of rf spectroscopy employed in studies of BEC-BCS physics in fermionic superfluids of degenerate cold gases. Here, we leverage the multilevel internal structure of the atoms to study the physics of Cooper pair breaking in this system. In doing so, we observe and distinguish the properties of two distinct many-body gaps, the BCS pairing gap and the spectral gap, using nondestructive readout techniques. The latter is found to depend on the populations of the internal atomic states, reflecting the chemical potential dependence predicted in fermionic superfluids. This work opens the path for more fully exploiting the rich internal structure of atoms in cavity QED emulators to study both analogous systems and also more exotic states yet to be realized.
BT - Physical Review Letters
DA - 2025-05
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.183404
M1 - 18
N1 - Publisher: American Physical Society
N2 - We use an ensemble of laser-cooled strontium atoms in a high-finesse cavity to cleanly emulate the technique of rf spectroscopy employed in studies of BEC-BCS physics in fermionic superfluids of degenerate cold gases. Here, we leverage the multilevel internal structure of the atoms to study the physics of Cooper pair breaking in this system. In doing so, we observe and distinguish the properties of two distinct many-body gaps, the BCS pairing gap and the spectral gap, using nondestructive readout techniques. The latter is found to depend on the populations of the internal atomic states, reflecting the chemical potential dependence predicted in fermionic superfluids. This work opens the path for more fully exploiting the rich internal structure of atoms in cavity QED emulators to study both analogous systems and also more exotic states yet to be realized.
PY - 2025
EP - 183404
T2 - Physical Review Letters
TI - Time-Resolved Spectral Gap Spectroscopy in a Quantum Simulator of Fermionic Superfluidity inside an Optical Cavity
UR - https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.183404
VL - 134
ER -