Light-Assisted Collisions in Tweezer-Trapped Lanthanides

TL;DR

This paper investigates light-assisted collisions in erbium atoms trapped in optical tweezers, combining experimental data with a Monte Carlo model to optimize single-atom preparation.

Contribution

It introduces a first-principles Monte Carlo simulation to analyze light-mediated processes in erbium tweezers, guiding experimental optimization.

Findings

Validated the Monte Carlo model against experimental data.

Explored different erbium transitions for improved single-atom preparation.

Provided insights into recoil heating, cooling, and collision dynamics.

Abstract

We present a quantitative investigation of one- and two-body light-mediated processes that occur to few erbium atoms in an optical tweezer, when exposed to near-resonant light. In order to study the intertwined effects of recoil heating, cooling and light-assisted collisions, we develop a first-principles Monte Carlo algorithm that solves the coupled dynamics of both the internal and external degrees of freedom of the atoms. After validating our theoretical model against experimental data, we use the predictive power of our code to guide our experiment and, in particular, we explore the performance of different transitions of erbium for light-assisted collisions in terms of their efficiency and fidelity for single-atom preparation.