2004/09/10 by J. Kinast, Kinast, J., A. Turlapov +3
Chemistry · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #Other Condensed Matter (cond-mat.other) #Spectroscopy and Laser Applications #cond-mat.other
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/0409283
14 pages, 2 figures Submitted to Science Magazine Related theory appears in cond-mat/0411090
openalex publication_date 2004/09/10 · arxiv created 2004/11/03 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We report on the measurement of the heat capacity for an optically-trapped, strongly-interacting Fermi gas of atoms. In the experiments, a precise input of energy to the gas is followed by single-parameter thermometry. The thermometry determines a temperature parameter T from the best fit of a Thomas-Fermi distribution with a fixed Fermi radius to the spatial density of the cloud. At T=0.33, we observe a transition between two patterns of behavior: For T=0.33-2.15, we find that the heat capacity closely corresponds to that of a trapped normal Fermi gas of atoms with increased mass. At low temperatures T=0.04-0.33, the heat capacity clearly deviates from normal Fermi gas behavior.