Correlations and Pair Formation in a Repulsively Interacting Fermi Gas
Abstract
A degenerate Fermi gas is rapidly quenched into the regime of strong effective repulsion near a Feshbach resonance. The spin fluctuations are monitored using speckle imaging and, contrary to several theoretical predictions, the samples remain in the paramagnetic phase for arbitrarily large scattering length. Over a wide range of interaction strengths a rapid decay into bound pairs is observed over times on the order of 10/EF, preventing the study of equilibrium phases of strongly repulsive fermions. Our work suggests that a Fermi gas with strong short-range repulsive interactions does not undergo a ferromagnetic phase transition.
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