Core-Shell Magneto-Optical Trap for Alkaline-Earth-Metal-Like Atoms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel core-shell magneto-optical trap for alkaline-earth-metal-like atoms, significantly enhancing atom loading rates and numbers, with demonstrated improvements on ytterbium-174, promising broader applications in precision experiments.

Contribution

The paper presents a new core-shell MOT scheme that overcomes previous limitations, markedly increasing atom loading efficiency and quantity for AEML atoms.

Findings

Approximately 100-fold increase in loading rate for $^{174}$Yb.

About 10-fold increase in steady state atom number.

Scheme is adaptable to other AEML atoms.

Abstract

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.