A magneto-optical trap of silver and potassium atoms

Abstract

We demonstrate a dual magneto-optical trap of ${}^{109}$Ag and ${}^{39}$K. For silver, a decreasing-field Zeeman slower loads a MOT of $1.5\times 10^8$ atoms at a temperature of 0.74(5) mK, with laser cooling occurring primarily on the $D_2$ line of $4d^{10}5s{}^2{S}_{1/2}\to 5p{}^2{P}_{3/2}$ at 328 nm. We create a novel Ag "dark spot MOT," where shelving the atoms in a dark state enhances the captured atom number by a factor of two and the lifetime by a factor of four. For potassium, we obtain $2\times 10^8$ trapped atoms, and further cooling on the $D_1$ transition via grey molasses results in a cloud of $1.2\times 10^8$ atoms at 7(1) $\mu$K. We observe evidence of photoionization loss of the K MOT in the presence of Ag laser-cooling light, with implications for optimal dual species loading strategies. Our results on Ag point to simple and general laser cooling strategies for other coinage metals (Au, Cu). Furthermore, this work lays the foundation for the production of alkali-coinage metal degenerate quantum mixtures and highly polar molecules.

6 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• A High Phase-Space-Density Gas of Polar Molecules
• Laser cooling for quantum gases
• Topological superfluid in a Fermi-Bose mixture with a high critical temperature
• Highly polar molecules consisting of a copper or silver atom interacting with an alkali-metal or alkaline-earth-metal atom
• Merits of Heavy-Heavy Molecules for Electron Electric Dipole Moment Searches

Cited by in corpus (3)

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• Radioactive Molecules as Laboratories of Fundamental Physics
• High-flux cold lithium-6 and rubidium-87 atoms from compact two-dimensional magneto-optical traps