A microscope for Fermi gases

This thesis reports on a novel quantum gas microscope to investigate many-body systems of fermionic atoms in optical lattices. Single-site resolved imaging of ultracold lattice gases has enabled powerful studies of bosonic quantum many-body systems. The extension of this capability to Fermi gases offers new prospects to studying complex phenomena of strongly correlated systems, for which numerical simulations are often out of reach. Using standard techniques of laser cooling, optical trapping, and evaporative cooling, ultracold Fermi gases of ⁶Li are prepared and loaded into a large-scale 2D optical lattice of flexible geometry. The atomic distribution is frozen using a second, short-scaled lattice, where we perform Raman sideband cooling to induce fluorescence on each atom while maintaining its position. Together with high-resolution imaging, the fluorescence signals allow for reconstructing the initial atom distribution with single-site sensitivity and high fidelity. Magnetically driven evaporative cooling in the plane allows for producing degenerate Fermi gases with almost unity filling in the initial lattice, allowing for the first microscopic studies of ultracold gases with clear signatures of Fermi statistics. By preparing an ensemble of spin-polarised Fermi gases, we detect a flattening of the density profile towards the centre of the cloud, which is a characteristic of a band-insulating state. In one set of experiments, we demonstrate that losses of atom pairs on a single lattice site due to light-assisted collisions are circumvented. The oversampling of the second lattice allows for deterministic separation of the atom pairs into different sites. Compressing a high-density sample in a trap before loading into the lattice leads to many double occupancies of atoms populating different bands, which we can image with no evidence for pairwise losses. We therefore gain direct access to the true number statistics on each lattice site. Using this feature, we can evaluate the local number statistics on an ensemble of band-insulating clouds. In the central region of high filling, the atom number fluctuations are suppressed by an order of magnitude compared to classical gases, which is a manifestation of Pauli blocking. Occupation probabilities are used to measure the local entropy on each individual site. The entropy per atom is found to be as low as 0.34 kB in the band-insulating core. The extension of quantum gas microscopy to degenerate Fermi gases opens up new avenues in quantum simulation of strongly correlated many-body systems and can yield unprecedented insight into fermionic systems in and out of equilibrium, quantum magnetism and different phases of the Fermi-Hubbard model.