Spin-Energy Correlation in Degenerate Weakly-Interacting Fermi Gases

Abstract

Weakly interacting Fermi gases exhibit rich collective dynamics in spin-dependent potentials, arising from correlations between spin degrees of freedom and conserved single atom energies, offering broad prospects for simulating many-body quantum systems by engineering energy-space "lattices," with controlled energy landscapes and site to site interactions. Using quantum degenerate clouds of $^6$Li, confined in a spin-dependent harmonic potential, we measure complex, time-dependent spin-density profiles, varying on length scales much smaller than the cloud size. We show that a one-dimensional mean field model, without additional simplifying approximations, quantitatively predicts the observed fine structure. We measure the magnetic fields where the scattering lengths vanish for three different hyperfine state mixtures to provide new constraints on the collisional (Feshbach) resonance parameters.