Hamburg 2009 – scientific programme
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A: Fachverband Atomphysik
A 7: Ultracold atoms I: Traps and cooling (with Q)
A 7.1: Talk
Tuesday, March 3, 2009, 10:30–10:45, Audi-B
Sympathetic cooling towards a mixed quantum degenerate Gas of Yb and Rb — Florian Baumer, •Frank Münchow, Nils Nemitz, and Axel Görlitz — Institut für Experimentalphysik, Universität Düsseldorf
Quantum gases of ultracold polar molecules offer fascinating prospects for the realization of new forms of quantum matter with possible applications to quantum information and to precision measurements. Our approach is photoassociative production of YbRb molecules in a mixture of ultracold atomic Yb and Rb, where the special feature of our particular system is that in the ground state YbRb possesses an electric as well as a magnetic dipole moment.
An important step towards efficient molecule production using photoassociation is the realization of a quantum degenerate mixture of Yb and Rb. In our experimental setup the Yb atoms are held in a bichromatic optical dipole trap designed to have minimal effect on the evaporatively cooled 87Rb atoms which are held in a Ioffe-Pritchard type magnetic trap. Through interspecies collisions by 87Rb we have reached temperatures of 1µK at 174Yb atom numbers of 2 · 105. While sympathetic cooling works without loss of Yb atoms down into this temperature regime, quantum degeneracy in the mixed system has not yet been observed possibly due to excessive heating of the atoms due to technical noise. Currently, the nature of the heating mechanisms is under investigation and we will report on the latest results.