Sub-Doppler laser cooling and magnetic trapping of erbium

Abstract

We investigate cooling mechanisms in magneto-optically and magnetically trapped erbium. We find efficient sub-Doppler cooling in our trap, which can persist even in large magnetic fields due to the near degeneracy of two Lande g factors. Furthermore, a continuously loaded magnetic trap is demonstrated where we observe temperatures below 25 microkelvin. These favorable cooling and trapping properties suggest a number of scientific possibilities for rare-earth atomic physics, including narrow linewidth laser cooling and spectroscopy, unique collision studies, and degenerate bosonic and fermionic gases with long-range magnetic dipole coupling.

References in corpus (5)

• Bose-Einstein condensation of chromium
• Degenerate Fermi Gases of Ytterbium
• Optical atomic coherence at the one-second time scale
• Laser-trapping of Ra-225 and Ra-226 with repumping by room temperature blackbody radiation
• Scalable designs for quantum computing with rare-earth-ion-doped crystals

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Quantum degenerate dipolar Fermi gas
• Dipolar physics: A review of experiments with magnetic quantum gases
• Dysprosium magneto-optical traps
• Narrow-line magneto-optical cooling and trapping of strongly magnetic atoms
• Two-temperature momentum distribution in a Thulium magneto-optical trap
• Anisotropic sub-Doppler laser cooling in dysprosium magneto-optical traps
• Driving Dipolar Fermions into the Quantum Hall Regime by Spin-Flip Induced Insertion of Angular Momentum
• A Magneto-Optical Trap of Titanium Atoms