Physics & Astronomy Colloquium – Dr. Christopher Vale
About the event
The Department of Physics and Astronomy invites all to a colloquium featuring Dr. Chris Vale, Department of Physics at Swinburne University of Technology. Dr. Vale will present their talk, “Switching on a Fermi Superfluid”.
Abstract: Non-equilibrium phenomena play a central role in many and varied physical settings. In the quantum domain, gases of neutral atoms cooled to nanoKelvin temperatures offer a versatile platform to investigate dynamics in systems driven far from equilibrium. Here, we study a Fermi gas following an interaction quench across the normal to superfluid phase transition. Starting with a weakly attractive Fermi gas, interactions are jumped to the unitarity limit, and we measure the subsequent dynamics as the gas approaches equilibrium. Both pair formation and pair condensation are observed, along with their corresponding timescales. Interaction quenches can also excite the Higgs amplitude mode in Fermi superfluids, providing a measure of the pairing gap.