Degenerate Bose-Fermi mixtures of rubidium and ytterbium

TL;DR

This paper reports the first creation of a quantum degenerate mixture of bosonic rubidium and fermionic ytterbium atoms, demonstrating species-specific trapping and cooling techniques for potential impurity studies.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid optical dipole trap enabling independent control of rubidium and ytterbium, achieving simultaneous Bose-Einstein condensation and deep cooling of ytterbium.

Findings

Successfully cooled ytterbium to T/T_F=0.16

Produced a rubidium BEC of 3.5×10^5 atoms

Demonstrated independent potential tailoring for each species

Abstract

We report the first realization of a quantum degenerate mixture of bosonic $^{87}$Rb and fermionic $^{171}$Yb atoms in a hybrid optical dipole trap with a tunable, species-dependent trapping potential. $^{87}$Rb is shown to be a viable refrigerant for the non-interacting $^{171}$Yb atoms, cooling up to $2.4 \times 10^5$ $^{171}$Yb atoms to a temperature of $T/T_F = 0.16(2) $ while simultaneously forming a $^{87}$Rb BEC of $3.5 \times 10^5$ atoms. Furthermore we demonstrate our ability to independently tailor the potentials for each species, which paves the way for studying impurities immersed in a Bose gas.