Peltier cooling of fermionic quantum gases

Abstract

We propose a cooling scheme for fermionic quantum gases, based on the principles of the Peltier thermoelectric effect and energy filtering. The system to be cooled is connected to another harmonically trapped gas acting as a reservoir. The cooling is achieved by two simultaneous processes: (i) the system is evaporatively cooled and (ii) cold fermions from deep below the Fermi surface of the reservoir are injected below the Fermi level of the system, in order to fill the 'holes' in the energy distribution. This is achieved by a suitable energy dependence of the transmission coefficient connecting the system to the reservoir. The two processes can be viewed as simultaneous evaporative cooling of particles and holes. We show that both a significantly lower entropy per particle and faster cooling rate can be achieved than by using only evaporative cooling.