First strongly interacting dipolar Fermi gas!

Now in Physical Review Letter!

In our Erbium experiment, we have created the first two component dipolar Fermi gas with tunable interactions. This paves the way to studies of BEC-BCS physics in presence of an unprecedented few-body scattering scenario, including anisotropic long-range dipolar interactions and anisotropic short-range interactions.

Employing a lattice-protection technique, we could selectively prepare deeply degenerate mixtures of the two lowest spin states of fermionic erbium with a controllable imbalance. We have studied their scattering properties and identified a comparatively broad interspin Feshbach resonance in the vicinity of which we can tune the interspin interaction from strongly attractive to strongly repulsive. The Fermi mixture shows a remarkable collisional stability in the strongly interacting regime, providing a first step towards studies of superfluid pairing in the celebrated BEC-BCS crossover, adding the exceptional few-body scattering scenario brought by magnetic Lanthanide atoms.