Abstract

We create a one-dimensional strongly correlated quantum gas of Cs-133 atoms with attractive interactions by direct laser cooling in 300 ms. After compressing and cooling the optically trapped atoms to the vibrational ground state along two tightly confined directions, the emergence of a non-Gaussian time-of-flight distribution along the third, weakly confined direction reveals that the system enters a quantum degenerate regime. We observe a reduction of two- and three-body spatial correlations and infer that the atoms are directly cooled into a highly correlated excited metastable state, known as a super-Tonks-Girardeau gas.