Internship and thesis proposals
Probing the Fermi surface in a lattice with metastable helium atoms

Domaines
Quantum optics/Atomic physics/Laser
Quantum gases

Type of internship
Expérimental
Description
The helium lattice team exploits the properties of helium species to probe lattice gases atom-by-atom [1]. The apparatus, initially operated with the bosonic species helium-4 [2], led to study the Bogoliubov pairing through atom correlations [3,4], and to probe the superfluid-Mott transition through full counting statistics [5,6]. The detection method also applies to the fermionic species helium-3. Therefore, we have recently upgraded the apparatus to add helium-3 and produce a degenerate Fermi gas. In a near future, we will load the fermionic gas into lattices to perform studies of lattice fermions. The Master 2 internship will aim at characterizing the Fermi surface of non-interacting lattice fermions, leading to a PhD thesis centered on interacting lattice fermions (e.g. Fermi-Hubbard physics) and momentum correlations. The intern will join on-going efforts of the experimental team to achieve (i) loading helium-3 gas into the optical lattices, (ii) acquiring the experimental data, varying experimental parameters such as temperature or lattice filling, and (iii) analyzing the single-atom-resolved distributions to characterize the Fermi surface. [1] Phys. Rev. A 97, 061609 (2018); Phys. Rev. X Quantum 5, 040324 (2024). [2] Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 045301 (2021). [3] Nature Physics 17, 1364 (2021). [4] Nature Physics 21, 57-62 (2025). [5] Nature 655, 1148 (2026). [6] arXiv:2609.03433 (2026).

Contact
David CLEMENT
Laboratory : LCF - UMR8501
Team : Helium - Lattice
Team Website
/ Thesis :    Funding :