An ytterbium quantum gas microscope with narrow-line laser cooling

TL;DR

This paper reports the development of a quantum gas microscope for Ytterbium atoms, enabling site-resolved imaging with high fidelity by combining short-lattice optical trapping and narrow-line laser cooling, facilitating advanced quantum many-body studies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Ytterbium quantum gas microscope with narrow-line cooling, achieving high-resolution imaging and fidelity in a Hubbard-regime optical lattice, which was not previously demonstrated for Yb.

Findings

Achieved site-resolved imaging of Yb atoms in a 2D optical lattice.

Demonstrated effective cooling during imaging with a fidelity of 87%.

Enabled potential studies of long-range interacting quantum systems.

Abstract

We demonstrate site-resolved imaging of individual bosonic $^{174}\mathrm{Yb}$ atoms in a Hubbard-regime two-dimensional optical lattice with a short lattice constant of 266 nm. To suppress the heating by probe light with the $^1S_0$-$^1P_1$ transition of the wavelength $\lambda$ = 399 nm for high-resolution imaging and preserve atoms at the same lattice sites during the fluorescence imaging, we simultaneously cool atoms by additionally applying narrow-line optical molasses with the $^1S_0$-$^3P_1$ transition of the wavelength $\lambda$ = 556 nm. We achieve a low temperature of $T = 7.4(1.3)\ \mu\mathrm{K}$, corresponding to a mean oscillation quantum number along the horizontal axes of 0.22(4) during imaging process. We detect on average 200 fluorescence photons from a single atom within 400 ms exposure time, and estimate the detection fidelity of 87(2)%. The realization of a quantum gas microscope with enough fidelity for Yb atoms in a Hubbard-regime optical lattice opens up the possibilities for studying various kinds of quantum many-body systems such as Bose and Fermi gases, and their mixtures, and also long-range-interacting systems such as Rydberg states.