We report on an apparatus for cooling and trapping of neutral dysprosium. We characterize and optimize the performance of our Zeeman slower and 2D molasses cooling of the atomic beam by means of Doppler spectroscopy on a 136 kHz broad transition at 626 nm. Furthermore, we demonstrate the characterization and optimization procedure for the loading phase of a magneto-optical trap (MOT) by increasing the effective laser linewidth by sideband modulation. After optimization of the MOT compression phase, we cool and trap up to 10 9 atoms within 3 seconds in the MOT at temperatures of 9 µK and phase space densities of 1.7·10 −5 , which constitutes an ideal starting point for loading the atoms into an optical dipole trap and for subsequent forced evaporative cooling.
We present the first direct excitation of the presumably ultra-narrow 1001 nm ground state transition in atomic dysproium. By using resonance ionization spectroscopy with pulsed Ti:sapphire lasers at a hot cavity laser ion source, we were able to measure the isotopic shifts in the 1001 nm line between all seven stable isotopes. Furthermore, we determined the upper level energy from the atomic transition frequency of the 164 Dy isotope as 9991.004(1) cm −1 and confirm the level energy listed in the NIST database. Since a sufficiently narrow natural linewidth is an essential prerequisite for high precision spectroscopic investigations for fundamental questions we furthermore determined a lower limit of 2.9(1) µs for the lifetime of the excited state.
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