Efficient production of a narrow-line erbium magneto-optical trap with two-stage slowing

New opportunites for interactions and control with ultracold lanthanides

“…Moreover, because of their similarity in the atomic spectra, cooling concepts can be easily generalized between lanthanide species. To date, laser cooling has been demonstrated in erbium [18][19][20][21], dysprosium [22][23][24][25], holmium [26], thulium [27,28], europium [29], and also in erbium-dysprosium mixtures [30]. Further evaporative cooling has enabled the creation of degenerate gases of bosonic dysprosium [31] and erbium [32], followed shortly by the corresponding quantum degenerate Fermi gases [33,34].…”

“…We benchmark our simulator with an advanced theoretical approach, which takes quantum entanglement and spatial inhomogeneities into account [20]; see Appendix H. Moreover, we show that the spin-exchange dynamics can be fully controlled via optical light fields on timescales much faster than typical interaction times. The reported demonstration of these new control knobs, some without equivalence in alkali and chromium atoms, constitutes an important step toward a fully controllable quantum simulator, e.g., for the realization of synthetic dimension [21][22][23] or as qudits for quantum computation [24][25][26].…”

Active control of a diode laser with injection locking

“…In early experiments, those wavelengths are obtained by frequency doubling infrared lasers because of the limited power of the blue laser diode. The active locking scheme demonstrated in this work will provide a cost-effective way for cooling nonalkali cold atoms, such as ytterbium [25] and erbium [26] without using such a frequency doubling setup.…”

“…The scheme is already being used in the daily production of Bose-Einstein condensates of erbium atoms ( 168 Er) in our lab [26]. We employ two slave lasers to provide sufficient power for slowing erbium atoms from an effusive oven.…”

“…One slave laser delivers its full power to the major Zeeman slower, up to 30 mW after fiber coupling. The other slave laser provides similar power, solely used for the second stage Zeeman slower [26]. They are injection locked from the same master laser with the active locking scheme demonstrated in this work.…”