Abstract
The Pauli exclusion principle forbids indistinguishable fermions from occupying the same quantum mechanical state. The implications of this are profound; for example, it accounts for the electronic shell structure of atoms. Here, we performed measurements on the scattering of light from ultracold ensembles of atoms. For a Fermi gas in the quantum degenerate regime, we observed a marked suppression in scattering compared with a similarly prepared Bose gas. The observed decrease in fluorescence and the corresponding increase in light transmission results from Pauli blocking, where Fermi-Dirac statistics limits the number of accessible states for a scattering atom in a large Fermi sea. Our work confirms a fundamental result on the optical response of quantum gases and may contribute to cooling and thermometry schemes.