The T-REQS Lab publication on the first successful trapping of single erbium atoms in an array of optical tweezers, has been published in Physical Review Letters and chosen as an Editor’s Suggestion! See below for an excerpt from the Physics Magazine Synopsis of the publication:
On the bucket list for some atomic physicists is an experiment in which the interactions and positions of a large number of atoms can be precisely controlled. Now Francesca Ferlaino of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and her colleagues have developed one of the tools that could be well suited to such an experiment: an array of optical tweezer traps holding erbium atoms. These atoms have previously been held in trap arrays called optical lattices but not in optical tweezers, which allow researchers to move the traps during the experiment. Erbium atoms have ideal properties for the kind of highly excited states needed for this experiment, according to Ferlaino and her colleagues.
Congrats to the T-REQs team for this acheivement!
Read the full Physics Magazine Synopsis here: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v17/s151
See our write-up about the paper here: https://www.erbium.at/FF/optical-tweezer-arrays-of-erbium-atoms/