Light Assisted Collisional Loss in a ${}^{85/87}$Rb Ultracold Optical Trap

Abstract

We have studied hetero- and homonuclear excited state/ground state collisions by loading both ${}^{85}$Rb and ${}^{87}$Rb into a far off resonant trap (FORT). Because of the relatively weak confinement of the FORT, we expect the hyperfine structure of the different isotopes to play a crucial role in the collision rates. This dependence on hyperfine structure allows us to measure collisions associated with long range interatomic potentials of different structure: such as long and short ranged; or such as purely attractive, purely repulsive, or mixed attractive and repulsive. We observe significantly different loss rates for different excited state potentials. Additionally, we observe that some collisional channels' loss rates are saturated at our operating intensities (~15 mW/cm${}^2$). These losses are important limitations in loading dual isotope optical traps.

arXiv commentabout 8 pages, 5 figures

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• Counterintuitive transitions between crossing energy levels
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Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Losses of thulium atoms from optical dipole traps operating at 532 and 1064 nm
• Interisotope effects in optimal dual-isotope loading into a shallow optical trap
• Quantifying Light-assisted Collisions in Optical Tweezers Across the Hyperfine Spectrum