Correlations and Pair Formation in a Repulsively Interacting Fermi Gas

A degenerate Fermi gas is rapidly quenched into the regime of strong effective repulsion near a Feshbach resonance. The spin fluctuations are monitored using speckle imaging and, contrary to several theoretical predictions, the samples remain in the paramagnetic phase for an arbitrarily large scattering length. Over a wide range of interaction strengths a rapid decay into bound pairs is observed over times on the order of 10 (h) over bar /E-F, preventing the study of equilibrium phases of strongly repulsive fermions. Our work suggests that a Fermi gas with strong short-range repulsive interactions does not undergo a ferromagnetic phase transition.