Sawtooth wave adiabatic passage slowing of dysprosium

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a novel sawtooth wave adiabatic passage (SWAP) technique for efficiently slowing dysprosium atoms, achieving faster deceleration and improved robustness over traditional methods.

Contribution

It introduces the SWAP slowing method for dysprosium atoms and analyzes its efficiency, parameter range, and robustness compared to conventional optical molasses.

Findings

SWAP slowing is twice as fast as conventional optical molasses.

SWAP method maintains efficiency over a range of parameters.

Enhanced robustness in slowing fermionic dysprosium with SWAP.

Abstract

We report on sawtooth wave adiabatic passage (SWAP) slowing of bosonic and fermionic dysprosium isotopes by using a 136 kHz wide transition at 626 nm. A beam of precooled atoms is further decelerated in one dimension by the SWAP force and the amount of atoms at near zero velocity is measured. We demonstrate that the SWAP slowing can be twice as fast as in a conventional optical molasses operated on the same transition. In addition, we investigate the parameter range for which the SWAP force is efficiently usable in our set-up, and relate the results to the adiabaticity condition. Furthermore, we add losses to the hyperfine ground-state population of fermionic dysprosium during deceleration and observe more robust slowing with SWAP compared to slowing with the radiation pressure force.