Er-Dy LAB

The Er-Dy LAB focuses on many-body quantum phenomena in a dipolar quantum mixture of two highly magnetic lanthanides, Erbium and Dysprosium.

The designing process of the experimental apparatus started in late 2014 and several concepts have been developed in collaboration with our ERBIUM Team and the Er-Team at Harvard University led by Markus Greiner.

Er-Dy mixtures

In 2018, we produced the first quantum degenerate dipolar mixture of Erbium and Dysprosium!!

This two rare-earth species are highly magnetic with a magnetic moment of 7µ_B and 10µ_Bfor Er and Dy respectively. A crucial aspect is that the have very similar atomic properties such as melting point, mass and the optical spectrum. The Er-Dy LAB is able to either operate on a single species (Er or Dy) or to produce dipolar imbalanced Bose-Bose, Bose-Fermi and Fermi-Fermi Er-Dy mixtures.

A microscope for dipolar atoms

A quantum gas microscope is an optical system that allows to image single atoms in an optical lattice in situ. This conceptually simple, yet technologically demanding technique makes it possible to directly study the interactions between atoms in periodic potentials, a scenario which is only possible to simulate numerically for very limited system sizes. In contrast to other groups, we are aiming to realize such a microscope with atoms featuring a large, permanent magnetic dipole moment. The inter-atomic dipole-dipole interaction adds a new term to the Hamiltonian describing the ensemble, and therefore allows to investigate a whole new class of quantum systems. The behavior of the system will critically depend on the interplay between the different interaction terms, whose magnitude and direction dependence may be tuned experimentally over a wide range. Thus, a large variety of interesting quantum systems can be simulated and investigated.

A full list of the Er-Dy Lab Publications can be found here

Interested in joining us? Check out here.

Lab news

Quantum vortices in a dipolar gas!

Now published in Nature Physics, we have observed the first vortices in a dipolar quantum gas! The dipolar interaction brings forth a plethora of new physics to vortices, that we begin to investigate finding the coveted stripe vortex lattice!

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Welcome to Clemens

Welcome to Clemens Ulm, who has joined the Er-Dy team for his PhD. During his master study at the University of Strathclyde, Clemens has acquired a great knowledge on quantum-gas microscopes working in the group of Stefan Kuhr and Elmar Haller.

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Can Angular Oscillations Probe Superfluidity in Dipolar Supersolids?

In this now published work, we investigate the extent that angular oscillations of a dipolar supersolid can tell us about the superfluidity of the system. It extends previous studies of linear droplet arrays to two-dimensional crystals.

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Goodbye to Alex

Farewell to Alex Patscheider who has been with us since nearly the beginning of the Erbium and Er-Dy labs! Best of luck for the new adventures in Canada!

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Supersolids go round!

Our paper on supersolid formation in 2D is now published in PRL!

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Inter-species interactions in an Er-Dy condensate

Now published as an editors' suggestion in PRA, we present a first study of the influence of the dipole-dipole interaction on the total inter-species interaction in our erbium-dysprosium mixture, in collaboration with M. Modugno from the University of the Basque Country.

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