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

Academic excellence scholarship awarded to Sandra

Sandra Brandstetter, master student in the RARE Lab, has received an academic excellence scholarship of the University of Innsbruck. The scholarship is awarded every year for outstanding academic achievements in the previous academic year

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New Excellence Fellowship Program for Visiting Master Students: Applications are now open!

We are pleased to announce the launching a novel excellence fellowship program to provide support to external master students willing to join our group for their research project. The call for application for the year 2020 is now open. Application should be submitted until April 15th 2020 for an internship

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Deep Learning-Assisted Classification of Site-Resolved Quantum Gas Microscope Images

Now in Measurement Science and Technology! In collaboration with our theory colleague at IQOQI (Rick van Bijnen) we present a novel method for the analysis of quantum gas microscope images. Our method uses deep learning to improve the fidelity with which lattice sites can be classified as occupied or unoccupied.

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Group retreat to Grenoble (FR)

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"Cécile DeWitt-Morette" prize awarded to Francesca Ferlaino

Francesca won the first edition for the " remarkable work on ultra-cold atom gases " ranging from the early investigation on Efimov physics to the more recent results on dipolar quantum gases of Erbium and Erbium-Dysprosium.

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Congratulations to Francesca for the Junior BEC Award

Last week Francesca Ferlaino has received the Junior BEC Award 2019 for her “pioneering work on Bose-Einstein condensation of dipolar Erbium atoms and more generally degenerate quantum gases with long-range interactions and for realizing novel quantum phases of matter with such systems”.

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