Angular momentum of rotating fermionic superfluids by Sagnac phonon interferometry

Abstract

Fermionic many-body systems provide an unrivaled arena to investigate how interactions drive the emergence of collective quantum behavior, such as macroscopic coherence and superfluidity. Central to these phenomena is the formation of Cooper pairs, correlated states of two fermions that behave as composite bosons and condense below a critical temperature. However, unlike elementary bosons, these pairs retain their internal structure set by underlying fermionic correlations, essential for understanding superfluid properties throughout the so-called Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) crossover -- a cornerstone of strongly correlated fermionic matter. Here, we harness a sonic analog of the optical Sagnac effect to disclose the composite nature of fermionic condensates across the BEC-BCS crossover. We realize an in-situ loop interferometer by coherently exciting two counter-propagating long-wavelength phonons of an annular fermionic superfluid with tuneable interparticle interactions. The frequency degeneracy between clock- and anticlock-wise sound modes is lifted upon controllably injecting a quantized supercurrent in the superfluid ring, resulting in a measurable Doppler shift that enables us to probe the elementary quantum of circulation and the angular momentum carried by each particle in the fermionic fluid. Our observations directly reveal that the superflow circulation is quantized in terms of $h/2m$, where $m$ is the mass of the constituents, in striking contrast to bosonic condensates where $h/m$ is the relevant circulation quantum. Further, by operating our interferometer at tunable temperature, we measure the thermal depletion of the superfluid in the unitary Fermi gas, demonstrating phonon interferometry as a powerful technique for probing fundamental properties of strongly-correlated quantum systems.