A two-species five-beam magneto-optical trap for highly magnetic Er and Dy atoms

TL;DR

This paper reports the first two-species magneto-optical trap for erbium and dysprosium, using a novel five-beam geometry with narrow-line cooling, achieving high atom numbers and low temperatures for quantum mixture experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a new two-species MOT for Er and Dy with a simplified five-beam setup and demonstrates efficient cooling and trapping of both species.

Findings

Trapped up to 5×10^8 Er atoms and 10^9 Dy atoms.

Achieved temperatures around 10 μK.

Implemented a novel five-beam trap geometry.

Abstract

We report on the first realization of a two-species magneto-optical trap (MOT) for erbium and dysprosium. The MOT operates on an intercombination line for the respective species. Owing to the narrow-line character of such a cooling transition and the action of gravity, we demonstrate a novel trap geometry employing only five beams in orthogonal configuration. We observe that the mixture is cooled and trapped very efficiently, with up to \num{5e8} Er atoms and \num{e9} Dy atoms at temperatures of about $10\,\mu K$. Our results offer an ideal starting condition for the creation of a dipolar quantum mixture of highly magnetic atoms.