Itinerant Ferromagnetism in a Fermi Gas of Ultracold Atoms
Author(s)
Jo, Gyu-Boong; Lee, Ye-Ryoung; Choi, Jae-Hoon; Christensen, Caleb A.; Kim, Tony Hyun; Pritchard, David E.; Ketterle, Wolfgang; Thywissen, Joseph H.; ... Show more Show less
DownloadKetterle_Itinerant ferromagnetism.pdf (227.2Kb)
OPEN_ACCESS_POLICY
Open Access Policy
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Can a gas of spin-up and spin-down fermions become ferromagnetic because of repulsive interactions? We addressed this question, for which there is not yet a definitive theoretical answer, in an experiment with an ultracold two-component Fermi gas. The observation of nonmonotonic behavior of lifetime, kinetic energy, and size for increasing repulsive interactions provides strong evidence for a phase transition to a ferromagnetic state. Our observations imply that itinerant ferromagnetism of delocalized fermions is possible without lattice and band structure, and our data validate the most basic model for ferromagnetism introduced by Stoner.
Date issued
2009-09Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics; MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold AtomsJournal
Science
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Jo, G.-B., Y.-R. Lee, J.-H. Choi, C. A. Christensen, T. H. Kim, J. H. Thywissen, D. E. Pritchard, and W. Ketterle. “Itinerant Ferromagnetism in a Fermi Gas of Ultracold Atoms.” Science 325, no. 5947 (September 18, 2009): 1521–1524.
Version: Original manuscript
ISSN
0036-8075
1095-9203