Compressibility of a fermionic mott insulator of ultracold atoms

Physical Review Letters
Pedro M DuarteRandall G Hulet

Abstract

We characterize the Mott insulating regime of a repulsively interacting Fermi gas of ultracold atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice. We use in situ imaging to extract the central density of the gas and to determine its local compressibility. For intermediate to strong interactions, we observe the emergence of a plateau in the density as a function of atom number, and a reduction of the compressibility at a density of one atom per site, indicating the formation of a Mott insulator. Comparisons to state-of-the-art numerical simulations of the Hubbard model over a wide range of interactions reveal that the temperature of the gas is of the order of, or below, the tunneling energy scale. Our results hold great promise for the exploration of many-body phenomena with ultracold atoms, where the local compressibility can be a useful tool to detect signatures of different phases or phase boundaries at specific values of the filling.

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Citations

Dec 27, 2015·Physical Review Letters·Thereza PaivaRichard T Scalettar
Feb 27, 2016·Science·Daniel GreifMarkus Greiner
Sep 17, 2016·Science·Lawrence W CheukMartin W Zwierlein
Nov 6, 2018·Physical Review Letters·Shenglong XuCongjun Wu
Sep 26, 2020·Physical Review Letters·Thomas HartkeMartin Zwierlein
Jun 25, 2016·Physical Review Letters·Lawrence W CheukMartin W Zwierlein
Sep 22, 2018·Physical Review Letters·T L YangR G Hulet
Feb 23, 2020·Journal of Physics. Condensed Matter : an Institute of Physics Journal·Huan-Yu WangWu-Ming Liu
Dec 24, 2019·Physical Review Letters·Jian LinXiaopeng Li
May 14, 2016·Physical Review Letters·Eugenio CocchiMichael Köhl
Oct 10, 2020·Physical Review Letters·Erik G C P van LoonAndrey A Katanin

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