  Pairing of fermions is ubiquitous in nature and it is responsible for a large
variety of fascinating phenomena like superconductivity, superfluidity of
$^3$He, the anomalous rotation of neutron stars, and the BEC-BCS crossover in
strongly interacting Fermi gases. When confined to two dimensions, interacting
many-body systems bear even more subtle effects, many of which lack
understanding at a fundamental level. Most striking is the, yet unexplained,
effect of high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates, which is intimately
related to the two-dimensional geometry of the crystal structure. In
particular, the questions how many-body pairing is established at high
temperature and whether it precedes superconductivity are crucial to be
answered. Here, we report on the observation of pairing in a harmonically
trapped two-dimensional atomic Fermi gas in the regime of strong coupling. We
perform momentum-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, analogous to ARPES in the
solid state, to measure the spectral function of the gas and we detect a
many-body pairing gap above the superfluid transition temperature. Our
observations mark a significant step in the emulation of layered
two-dimensional strongly correlated superconductors using ultracold atomic
gases.
