A Mott Insulator of Ultracold Alkaline-Earth-Like Atoms

Abstract

The transition from a superfluid to a Mott insulator (MI) phase has been observed in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of ytterbium (Yb) atoms in an optical lattice. An all-optically produced BEC of 174Yb atoms was loaded into three-dimensional optical lattices produced by a 532 nm laser beam. The interference pattern was measured after releasing the quantum gas from the trapping potential. As increasing the optical lattice depth, we observed the disappearance of the interference patterns, which is a signature of entering the MI regime. This result is an important step into studies by using a combination of the MI state and the ultranarrow optical transition of ultracold alkaline-earth-like atoms.

4 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Quantum phase transition from a superfluid to a Mott insulator in a gas of ultracold atoms
• Degenerate Fermi Gases of Ytterbium
• Quantum computing with alkaline earth atoms
• Imaging the Mott Insulator Shells using Atomic Clock Shifts
• Two-color photoassociation spectroscopy of ytterbium atoms and the precise determinations of s-wave scattering lengths
• Interference pattern and visibility of a Mott insulator
• All-Optical Formation of Quantum Degenerate Mixtures
• Bose-Einstein Condensation of an Ytterbium Isotope
• Frequency evaluation of the doubly forbidden ${}^1{S}_0{\to }^3{P}_0$ transition in bosonic ${}^{174}$Yb
• Sideband cooling while preserving coherences in the nuclear spin state in group-II-like atoms

Cited by in corpus (18)

• Ultracold Gases of Ytterbium: Ferromagnetism and Mott States in an SU(6) Fermi System
• Bose-Einstein condensation of alkaline earth atoms: ${}^{40}${Ca}
• Long-range interacting many-body systems with alkaline-earth-metal atoms
• Comparing and contrasting nuclei and cold atomic gases
• Cooperative eigenmodes and scattering in 1D atomic arrays
• A Z${}_2$ spin-orbital liquid state in the square lattice Kugel-Khomskii model
• Fano-Hopfield model and photonic band gaps for an arbitrary atomic lattice
• Adiabatic loading of one-dimensional SU(N) alkaline earth fermions in optical lattices
• Non-destructive selective probing of phononic excitations in a cold Bose gas using impurities
• Cooperative quantum-optical planar arrays of atoms
• Projective measurement of a single nuclear spin qubit by using two-mode cavity QED
• Quantum simulation with fully coherent dipole--dipole-interactions mediated by three-dimensional subwavelength atomic arrays
• Mobile impurities interacting with a few one-dimensional lattice bosons
• Optical magnetism and wavefront control by arrays of strontium atoms
• Negative refraction of light in an atomic medium
• Quantum crystal growing: Adiabatic preparation of a bosonic antiferromagnet in the presence of a parabolic inhomogeneity
• A generalized effective spin-chain formalism for strongly interacting spinor gases in optical lattice
• Thermodynamic properties of two-component fermionic atoms trapped in a two-dimensional optical lattice