T-REQS Scientific News

Category for scientific news of the T-REQS group

Optical Tweezer Arrays of Erbium Atoms

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Optical Tweezer Arrays of Erbium Atoms
Image credit: D. S. Grün, University of Innsbruck

Now published in the journal “Physical Review Letters”, and featured in Physics Magazine as an Editors’ Suggestion!

The T-REQS Lab presents the first successful trapping of single erbium atoms in an array of optical tweezers, marking a significant milestone in the use of erbium for quantum simulation. For the experimental details of this achievement by the T-REQS team, see the following excerpt from the abstract:

Using a single narrow-line optical transition, we achieve deep cooling for direct tweezer loading, pairwise ejection, and continous imaging without additional recoil suppression techniques. Our tweezer wavelength choice enables us to reach the magic trapping condition by tuning the ellipticity of the trapping light. Additionally, we implement an ultrafast high-fidelity fluorescence imaging scheme using a broad transition, allowing time-resolved study of the tweezer population dynamics from many to single atoms during light-assisted collisions. In particular, we extract a pair-ejection rate that qualitatively agrees with the semiclassical predictions by the Gallagher-Pritchard model.

See the article in PRL here: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.223402

Read the Physics Magazine Synopsis here: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v17/s151

See the pre-print here: Optical Tweezer Arrays of Erbium Atoms arxiv.org/abs/2405.01499.

Review of recent experiments with dipolar gases

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The last 15 years has seen tremendous experimental progress for the manipulation and control of ultracold atoms with sizeable dipole-dipole interactions. In this review, together with other group leaders who first condensed dysprosium and chromium, we review the discoveries made so far, and lay out the future perspectives for this exciting field!

The paper can be found here: Dipolar physics: a review of experiments with magnetic quantum gases – IOPscience

Erbium in optical tweezers!

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In the T-REQS lab we have now loaded our first Er atoms into optical tweezers! This is an significant step towards our goal of producing arrays of single atoms within tweezers which we will use to study the interactions of Rydberg atoms.

A new erbium MOT in the T-REQS lab!

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After several months of preparations and setting up our system, we have produced our first ultracold atomic cloud of erbium atoms in our new T-REQS lab. After initial slowing down in a Zeeman slower with a broad transition, we trap and cool 166Er atoms in a 5 beam magneto-optical trap operating on the narrow linewidth transition at 583nm. We trap up to 120 million atoms and cool them to ~15 microkelvin in a compressed MOT phase. This is a first step on our way to trapping ultracold erbium atoms in optical tweezers.

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