Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.

Originally published in Science Express on 29 August 2002
Science 27 September 2002:
Vol. 297. no. 5590, pp. 2240 - 2243
DOI: 10.1126/science.1077386
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Reports

Collapse of a Degenerate Fermi Gas

Giovanni Modugno,* Giacomo Roati, Francesco Riboli, Francesca Ferlaino, Robert J. Brecha, Massimo Inguscio

A degenerate gas of identical fermions is brought to collapse by the interaction with a Bose-Einstein condensate. We used an atomic mixture of fermionic potassium-40 and bosonic rubidium-87, in which the strong interspecies attraction leads to an instability above a critical number of particles. The observed phenomenon suggests a direction for manipulating fermion-fermion interactions on the route to superfluidity.

European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy, Università di Firenze, and Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia (INFM), Via Nello Carrara 1, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy.
*   To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: modugno{at}lens.unifi.it

Read the Full Text


THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Observation of a Strongly Interacting Degenerate Fermi Gas of Atoms.
K. M. O'Hara, S. L. Hemmer, M. E. Gehm, S. R. Granade, and J. E. Thomas (2002)
Science 298, 2179-2182
   Abstract »    Full Text »    PDF »


To Advertise     Find Products

Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)