Is an Ultra-Cold Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas a Perfect Fluid?

Understand

Fermi gases with magnetically tunable interactions provide a clean and controllable laboratory system for modeling interparticle interactions between fermions in nature.

• The s-wave scattering length, which is dominant a low temperature, is made to diverge by tuning near a collisional (Feshbach) resonance.
• In this regime, two-component Fermi gases are stable and strongly interacting, enabling tests of nonperturbative many-body theories in a variety of disciplines, from high temperature superconductors to neutron matter and quark-gluon plasmas.
• We have developed model-independent methods for measuring the entropy and energy of this model system, providing a benchmark for calculations of the thermodynamics.