Band and Correlated Insulators of Cold Fermions in a Mesoscopic Lattice

We investigate the transport properties of neutral, fermionic atoms passing a one-dimensional quantum wire containing a mesoscopic lattice. The is realized by projecting individually controlled, thin optical on top of a ballistic conductor. Building an increasingly longer, one site after another, we observe and characterize the emergence of a insulating phase, demonstrating control over quantum-coherent transport. explore the influence of atom-atom interactions and show that the insulating persists as contact interactions are tuned from moderately to strongly. Using bosonization and classical Monte-Carlo simulations we analyze a model of interacting fermions and find good qualitative agreement with data. The robustness of the insulating state supports the existence of a-Emery liquid in the one-dimensional wire. Our work realizes a tunable,-controlled lattice Fermi gas strongly coupled to reservoirs, which is an test bed for non-equilibrium many-body physics.