Frankfurt 2006 – scientific programme
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Q: Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 31: Poster Fallen und Kühlung
Q 31.1: Poster
Tuesday, March 14, 2006, 16:30–18:30, Labsaal
A bichromatic MOT for Ytterbium atoms — •Florian Baumer, Sven Kroboth, Nils Nemitz, and Axel Görlitz — Institut für Experimentalphysik, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
We report on cooling and trapping of Ytterbium (Yb) atoms in a MOT using two different transitions.
In a MOT operating on the 1S0 → 1P1 transition at 399nm, all seven stable Yb isotopes have been trapped. For the spinless bosonic Yb isotopes, only Doppler cooling occurs and consequently we observe temperatures as high as several mK (Doppler limit: ≈ 700 µK). In contrast, the fermionic isotopes 171Yb and 173Yb possess nuclear spin, which makes polarization-gradient cooling possible. We observe MOT temperatures of around 200 µK for 171Yb and below 50 µK for 173Yb.
We recently succeeded in trapping Yb atoms in an additional MOT using the 1S0 → 3P1 intercombination line at 556nm. This transition is of special interest, as its small linewidth of 182kHz results in a very low Doppler limit of 4µK. As a next step we plan to transfer the Yb atoms to an optical dipole trap.