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We report on the realization of a magneto-optical trap (MOT) for metastable strontium operating on the 2.92 $mu$m transition between the energy levels $5s5p~^3mathrm{P}_2$ and $5s4d~^3mathrm{D}_3$. The strontium atoms are initially captured in a MOT operating on the 461 nm transition between the energy levels $5s^2~^1mathrm{S}_0$ and $5s5p~^1mathrm{P}_1$, prior to being transferred into the metastable MOT and cooled to a final temperature of 6 $mu$K. Challenges arising from aligning the mid-infrared and 461 nm light are mitigated by employing the same pyramid reflector to realize both MOTs. Finally, the 2.92 $mu$m transition is used to realize a full cooling sequence for an optical lattice clock, in which cold samples of $^{87}mathrm{Sr}$ are loaded into a magic-wavelength optical lattice and initialized in a spin-polarized state to allow high-precision spectroscopy of the $5s^2~^1mathrm{S}_0$ to $5s5p~^3mathrm{P}_0$ clock transition.
We report on a transportable optical clock, based on laser-cooled strontium atoms trapped in an optical lattice. The experimental apparatus is composed of a compact source of ultra-cold strontium atoms including a compact cooling laser set-up and a transportable ultra-stable laser for interrogating the optical clock transition. The whole setup (excluding electronics) fits within a volume of less than 2 m$^3$. The high degree of operation reliability of both systems allowed the spectroscopy of the clock transition to be performed with 10 Hz resolution. We estimate an uncertainty of the clock of $7times10^{-15}$.
We report on the experimental realization of a robust and efficient magneto-optical trap for erbium atoms, based on a narrow cooling transition at 583nm. We observe up to $N=2 times 10^{8}$ atoms at a temperature of about $T=15 mu K$. This simple scheme provides better starting conditions for direct loading of dipole traps as compared to approaches based on the strong cooling transition alone, or on a combination of a strong and a narrow kHz transition. Our results on Er point to a general, simple and efficient approach to laser cool samples of other lanthanide atoms (Ho, Dy, and Tm) for the production of quantum-degenerate samples.
Strontium optical lattice clocks have the potential to simultaneously interrogate millions of atoms with a high spectroscopic quality factor of $4 times 10^{-17}$. Previously, atomic interactions have forced a compromise between clock stability, which benefits from a large atom number, and accuracy, which suffers from density-dependent frequency shifts. Here, we demonstrate a scalable solution which takes advantage of the high, correlated density of a degenerate Fermi gas in a three-dimensional optical lattice to guard against on-site interaction shifts. We show that contact interactions are resolved so that their contribution to clock shifts is orders of magnitude lower than in previous experiments. A synchronous clock comparison between two regions of the 3D lattice yields a $5 times 10^{-19}$ measurement precision in 1 hour of averaging time.
We have constructed a magneto-optical trap (MOT) for metastable triplet helium atoms utilizing the 2 3S1 -> 3 3P2 line at 389 nm as the trapping and cooling transition. The far-red-detuned MOT (detuning Delta = -41 MHz) typically contains few times 10^7 atoms at a relatively high (~10^9 cm^-3) density, which is a consequence of the large momentum transfer per photon at 389 nm and a small two-body loss rate coefficient (2 * 10^-10 cm^3/s < beta < 1.0 * 10^-9 cm^3/s). The two-body loss rate is more than five times smaller than in a MOT on the commonly used 2 3S1 -> 2 3P2 line at 1083 nm. Furthermore, we measure a temperature of 0.46(1) mK, a factor 2.5 lower as compared to the 1083 nm case. Decreasing the detuning to Delta= -9 MHz results in a cloud temperature as low as 0.25(1) mK, at small number of trapped atoms. The 389 nm MOT exhibits small losses due to two-photon ionization, which have been investigated as well.
We propose and demonstrate a new magneto-optical trap (MOT) for alkaline-earth-metal-like (AEML) atoms where the narrow $^{1}S_{0}rightarrow$$^{3}P_{1}$ transition and the broad $^{1}S_{0}rightarrow$$^{1}P_{1}$ transition are spatially arranged into a core-shell configuration. Our scheme resolves the main limitations of previously adopted MOT schemes, leading to a significant increase in both the loading rate and the steady state atom number. We apply this scheme to $^{174}$Yb MOT, where we show about a hundred-fold improvement in the loading rate and ten-fold improvement in the steady state atom number compared to reported cases that we know of to date. This technique could be readily extended to other AEML atoms to increase the statistical sensitivity of many different types of precision experiments.