Anisotropic polarizability of erbium atoms

Abstract

We report on the determination of the dynamical polarizability of ultracold erbium atoms in the ground and in one excited state at three different wavelengths, which are particularly relevant for optical trapping. Our study combines experimental measurements of the light shift and theoretical calculations. In particular, our experimental approach allows us to isolate the different contributions to the polarizability, namely the isotropic scalar and anisotropic tensor part. For the latter contribution, we observe a clear dependence of the atomic polarizability on the angle between the laser-field-polarization axis and the quantization axis, set by the external magnetic field. Such an angle-dependence is particularly pronounced in the excited-state polarizability. We compare our experimental findings with the theoretical values, based on semi-empirical electronic-structure calculations and we observe a very good overall agreement. Our results pave the way to exploit the anisotropy of the tensor polarizability for spin-selective preparation and manipulation.

References in corpus (12)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Bose-Einstein Condensation of Erbium
• Quantum degenerate dipolar Fermi gas
• Degenerate Fermi Gases of Ytterbium
• Homogeneous Atomic Fermi Gases
• Anisotropic Polarizability of Ultracold Polar ${}^{40}$K${}^{87}$Rb Molecules
• Site-resolved imaging of ytterbium atoms in a two-dimensional optical lattice
• Spin-dependent Optical Superlattice
• AC Stark Effect in Ultracold Polar RbCs Molecules
• Anisotropic dependence of tune-out wavelength near Dy 741-nm transition
• Probing the axis alignment of an ultracold spin-polarized ${\text{Rb}}_2$ molecule
• Accumulation of chromium metastable atoms into an Optical Trap

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Spatial separation of rotating binary Bose-Einstein condensate by tuning the dipolar interactions