Absence of Heating in a Uniform Fermi Gas Created by Periodic Driving

Ultracold atomic gas provides a useful tool to explore many-body physics. One of the recent additions to this experimental toolbox is Floquet engineering, where periodic modulation of the Hamiltonian allows the creation of effective potentials that do not exist otherwise. When subject to external modulations, however, generic interacting many-body systems absorb energy, thus posing a heating problem that may impair the usefulness of this method. For discrete systems with bounded local energy, an exponentially suppressed heating rate with driving frequency has been observed previously, leaving the system in a prethermal state for exceedingly long durations. However, for systems in continuous space, the situation remains unclear. Here, we show that Floquet engineering can be applied to a strongly interacting degenerate Fermi gas held in a flat boxlike potential without inducing excessive heating on experimentally relevant timescales. The driving eliminates the effect of a spin-dependent potential originating from the simultaneous magnetic levitation of two different spin states. We calculate the heating rate and obtain a power-law suppression with the drive frequency. To further test the many-body behavior of the driven gas, we measure both the pair-condensation fraction at unitarity and the contact parameter across the BEC-BCS crossover. At low driving frequencies, the condensate fraction is reduced by the time-dependent force, but at higher frequencies, it revives and attains an even higher value than without driving. Our results are promising for future exploration of exotic many-body phases of a bulk strongly interacting Fermi gas with dynamically engineered Hamiltonians.

Automated summary

Ultracold atomic gas is a useful tool for studying many-body physics. Floquet engineering, a recent addition to the experimental toolbox, creates effective potentials through periodic modulation of the Hamiltonian. However, external modulations can lead to energy absorption and heating in many-body systems. This study shows that Floquet engineering can be applied to a strongly interacting fermionic gas without inducing excessive heating. The results provide insight into the behavior of driven many-body systems and have potential implications for exploring exotic phases of strongly interacting fermions.