Pairing without Superfluidity: The Ground State of an Imbalanced Fermi Mixture

Abstract

Radio-frequency spectroscopy is used to study pairing in the normal and superfluid phases of a strongly interacting Fermi gas with imbalanced spin populations. At high spin imbalances the system does not become superfluid even at zero temperature. In this normal phase full pairing of the minority atoms is observed. This demonstrates that mismatched Fermi surfaces do not prevent pairing but can quench the superfluid state, thus realizing a system of fermion pairs that do not condense even at the lowest temperature.