We study the emergence of dissipation in an atomic Josephson junction between weakly coupled superfluid Fermi gases. We find that vortex-induced phase slippage is the dominant microscopic source of dissipation across the BEC–BCS crossover. We explore different dynamical regimes by tuning the bias chemical potential between the two superfluid reservoirs. For small excitations, we observe dissipation and phase coherence to coexist, with a resistive current followed by well-defined Josephson oscillations. We link the junction transport properties to the phase-slippage mechanism, finding that vortex nucleation is primarily responsible for the observed trends of the conductance and critical current. For large excitations, we observe the irreversible loss of coherence between the two superfluids, and transport cannot be described only within an uncorrelated phase-slip picture. Our findings open new directions for investigating the interplay between dissipative and superfluid transport in strongly correlated Fermi systems, and general concepts in out-of-equilibrium quantum systems.

A. Burchianti, et al.,
Connecting Dissipation and Phase Slips in a Josephson Junction between Fermionic Superfluids
Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 025302 (2018)

We observed the transition to BEC for ¹⁶²Dy atoms!
Our dipolar BECs are made up at the moment by up to 3⨯10⁴ atoms. Atoms from the MOT are transferred into an in-vacuum optical resonator where we perform a first evaporation down to a few μK. Afterwards, we load the atoms in a crossed optical trap and condensation temperature is reached by evaporation ramps. The atomic dipoles are aligned along the vertical direction by an uniform magnetic field of a few Gauss and the vertical trapping frequency is higher than the horizontal ones to prevent dipolar collapse. The transition temperature for our trapping potential is below 100 nK.

We achieved a ⁸⁷Rb condensate of 4⨯10⁵ atoms in the F=2, m_F=2 state. We use a hybrid trap consisting of a single focused laser beam at 1064nm (dimple) in the horizontal direction and a quadrupole magnetic field. The dimple is vertically shifted with respect to the quadrupole center to avoid Majorana spin-flips. A first evaporation ramp with a microwave driving the (2,2) to (1,1) transition, is followed by an optical evaporation.

We report on the measurement of the scattering properties of ultracold ¹⁷⁴Yb bosons in a three-dimensional optical lattice. Site occupancy in an atomic Mott insulator is resolved with high-precision spectroscopy on an ultranarrow, metrological optical clock transition. Scattering lengths and loss rate coefficients for ¹⁷⁴Yb atoms in different collisional channels involving the ground state ¹S₀ and the metastable ³P₀ states are derived. These studies set important constraints for future experimental studies of two-electron atoms for quantum-technological applications

L. Franchi et al.,
State-dependent interactions in ultracold ¹⁷⁴Yb probed by optical clock spectroscopy
New J. Phys. 19, 103037 (2017)

Quantum phase slips, i.e., the primary excitations in one-dimensional superfluids at low temperature, have been well characterized in most condensed-matter systems, with the notable exception of ultracold quantum gases. Here we present our experimental investigation of the dissipation in one-dimensional Bose superfluids flowing along a periodic potential, which show signatures of the presence of quantum phase slips. In particular, by controlling the velocity of the superfluid and the interaction between the bosons we are apparently able to drive a crossover from a regime of thermal phase slips into a regime of quantum phase slips. Achieving a good control of quantum phase slips in ultracold quantum gases requires to keep under control other phenomena such as the breaking of superfluidity at the critical velocity or the appearance of a Mott insulator in the strongly correlated regime. Here we show our current results in these directions.

S. Scaffidi Abbate, et al.,
Exploring quantum phase slips in 1D bosonic systems
Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Top. 226, 2815 (2017)