Speckle Imaging of Spin Fluctuations in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas

Abstract

Spin fluctuations and density fluctuations are studied for a two-component gas of strongly interacting fermions along the Bose-Einstein condensate-BCS crossover. This is done by in situ imaging of dispersive speckle patterns. Compressibility and magnetic susceptibility are determined from the measured fluctuations. This new sensitive method easily resolves a tenfold suppression of spin fluctuations below shot noise due to pairing, and can be applied to novel magnetic phases in optical lattices.