Fermions

The laser cooling mechanisms described in Chapter 4 operate irrespective of the statistics of the atom, and they can therefore be used to cool Fermi species. The statistics of a neutral atom is determined by the number of neutrons in the nucleus, which must be odd for a fermionic atom. Since alkali atoms have odd atomic number Z, their fermionic isotopes have even mass number A. Such isotopes are relatively less abundant than those with odd A since they have both an unpaired neutron and an unpaired proton, which increases their energy by virtue of the odd–even effect. In early experiments, 40K and 6Li atoms were cooled to about one-quarter of the Fermi temperature. More recently, fermionic alkali atoms have been cooled to temperatures well below one-tenth of their Fermi temperature, and in addition a degenerate gas of the fermionic species 173Yb (with I = 5/2) has been prepared.

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