English

Anisotropic relaxation dynamics in a dipolar Fermi gas driven out of equilibrium

Quantum Gases 2014-12-31 v2 Atomic Physics

Abstract

We report on the observation of a large anisotropy in the rethermalization dynamics of an ultracold dipolar Fermi gas driven out of equilibrium. Our system consists of an ultracold sample of strongly magnetic 167^{167}Er fermions, spin-polarized in the lowest Zeeman sublevel. In this system, elastic collisions arise purely from universal dipolar scattering. Based on cross-dimensional rethermalization experiments, we observe a strong anisotropy of the scattering, which manifests itself in a large angular dependence of the thermal relaxation dynamics. Our result is in very good agreement with recent theoretical predictions. Furthermore, we measure the rethermalization rate as a function of temperature for different angles and find that the suppression of collisions by Pauli blocking is not influenced by the dipole orientation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1405.1537,
  title  = {Anisotropic relaxation dynamics in a dipolar Fermi gas driven out of equilibrium},
  author = {K. Aikawa and A. Frisch and M. Mark and S. Baier and R. Grimm and J. L. Bohn and D. S. Jin and G. M. Bruun and F. Ferlaino},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.1537},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

5 pages, 4 figures