Observing Pauli Blocking with Cold Collisions
Multiple scattering dynamics of fermions at an isolated p-wave resonance
Nature Communications 7, 12069 (2016).
The wavefunction for indistinguishable fermions is anti-symmetric under particle exchange, which directly leads to the Pauli exclusion principle, and hence underlies the structure of atoms and the properties of almost all materials. In the dynamics of collisions between two indistinguishable fermions, this requirement strictly prohibits scattering into 90° angles. By colliding ultracold clouds of fermionic 40K atoms, the team lead by AProf. Niels Kjærgaard and PhD student Ryan Thomas explore this important effect of Pauli blocking by directly measuring the spatial distributions of scattered atoms.
