Experimental setup for the production of ultracold strongly correlated fermionic superfluids of 6Li

Abstract

We present our experimental setup to produce ultracold strongly correlated fermionic superfluids made of a two-component spin-mixture of 6Li atoms. Employing standard cooling techniques, we achieve quantum degeneracy in a single-beam optical dipole trap. Our setup is capable of generating spin-balanced samples at temperatures as low as T/TF = 0.1 containing up to 5 × 10^4 atomic pairs. We can access different superfluid regimes by tuning the interparticle interactions close to a broad magnetic Feshbach resonance. In particular, we are able to explore the crossover from the molecular Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid regimes. In the near future, we plan to study different collective excitations in these superfluid samples.