Two-photon photoassociation spectroscopy of CsYb: ground-state interaction potential and interspecies scattering lengths

Abstract

We perform two-photon photoassociation spectroscopy of the heteronuclear CsYb molecule to measure the binding energies of near-threshold vibrational levels of the $X{}^2{\Sigma }_{1/2}^{+}$ molecular ground state. We report results for ${}^{133}$Cs${}^{170}$Yb, ${}^{133}$Cs${}^{173}$Yb and ${}^{133}$Cs${}^{174}$Yb, in each case determining the energy of several vibrational levels including the least-bound state. We fit an interaction potential based on electronic structure calculations to the binding energies for all three isotopologs and find that the ground-state potential supports 77 vibrational levels. We use the fitted potential to predict the interspecies s-wave scattering lengths for all seven Cs+Yb isotopic mixtures.

11 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables