Large spin relaxation rates in trapped submerged-shell atoms

Abstract

Spin relaxation due to atom-atom collisions is measured for magnetically trapped erbium and thulium atoms at a temperature near 500 mK. The rate constants for Er-Er and Tm-Tm collisions are 3.0 times 10^-10 cm^3 s^-1 and 1.1 times 10^-10 cm^3 s^-1, respectively, 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than those observed for highly magnetic S-state atoms. This is strong evidence for an additional, dominant, spin relaxation mechanism, electrostatic anisotropy, in collisions between these "submerged-shell" L > 0 atoms. These large spin relaxation rates imply that evaporative cooling of these atoms in a magnetic trap will be highly inefficient.

10 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Inelastic Collisions in Optically Trapped Ultracold Metastable Ytterbium
• Multichannel cold collisions between metastable Sr atoms
• Spin-exchange collisions of submerged shell atoms below 1 Kelvin
• Zeeman slowing of thulium atoms

Cited by in corpus (22)

• Bose-Einstein Condensation of Erbium
• Dipolar physics: A review of experiments with magnetic quantum gases
• Quantum Chaos in Ultracold Collisions of Erbium
• Trapping ultracold dysprosium: a highly magnetic gas for dipolar physics
• Observation of low-field Fano-Feshbach resonances in ultracold gases of dysprosium
• Narrow-line magneto-optical trap for erbium
• Magneto-Optical Trap for Thulium Atoms
• Dysprosium magneto-optical traps
• Anisotropy induced Feshbach resonances in a quantum dipolar gas of magnetic atoms
• Controlling interactions between highly-magnetic atoms with Feshbach resonances
• Inner-shell magnetic dipole transition in Tm atom as a candidate for optical lattice clocks
• Anisotropic polarizability of erbium atoms
• Anisotropy in the Interaction of Ultracold Dysprosium
• Hyperfine structure of laser-cooling transitions in fermionic erbium-167
• Magneto-optical trapping of optically pumped metastable europium
• Polarized cold cloud of thulium atom
• Light assisted collisions in ultra-cold Tm atoms
• Collisional properties of cold spin-polarized nitrogen gas: theory, experiment, and prospects as a sympathetic coolant for trapped atoms and molecules
• Few-body physics of ultracold atoms and molecules with long-range interactions
• Sub-nanometer optical linewidth of thulium atoms in rare gas crystals
• Properties of the ground ${}^3$F${}_2$ state and the excited ${}^3$P${}_0$ state of atomic thorium in cold collisions with ${}^3$He
• Magnetic Moments of Lanthanide van der Waals Dimers