Creation of a degenerate Bose-Bose mixture of erbium and lithium atoms

TL;DR

This paper reports creating a degenerate mixture of erbium and lithium atoms, demonstrating efficient sympathetic cooling and low three-body losses, enabling studies of large mass imbalance interactions.

Contribution

The first realization of a degenerate Er-Li mixture with efficient cooling and low loss, suitable for exploring large mass imbalance phenomena.

Findings

Efficient sympathetic cooling of Li by Er.

Low three-body loss rates observed.

Potential for studying large mass imbalance interactions.

Abstract

We report the realization of a degenerate mixture of $^{166}$Er and $^{7}$Li atoms in their energetically lowest spin states. The two species are sequentially laser-cooled and loaded into an optical dipole trap, then transported to a glass cell and simultaneously evaporated to degeneracy. Er serves as the coolant for Li, and we observe efficient sympathetic cooling facilitated by a large interspecies elastic scattering cross section. Three-body losses are found to be small, making this platform promising for the study of interacting mixtures with large mass imbalance.