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arXiv · 1101.5142

Sympathetic cooling in an optically trapped mixture of alkali and spin-singlet atoms

Vladyslav V. Ivanov·Alexander Khramov·Anders H. Hansen·William H. Dowd·Frank Muenchow·Alan O. Jamison·Subhadeep Gupta
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Abstract

We report on the realization of a stable mixture of ultracold lithium and ytterbium atoms confined in a far-off-resonance optical dipole trap. We observe sympathetic cooling of 6Li by 174Yb and extract the s-wave scattering length magnitude |a6Li-174Yb| = (13 \pm 3)a0 from the rate of inter-species thermalization. Using forced evaporative cooling of 174Yb, we achieve reduction of the 6Li temperature to below the Fermi temperature, purely through inter-species sympathetic cooling.

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Vladyslav V. Ivanov, Alexander Khramov, Anders H. Hansen, William H. Dowd, Frank Muenchow, Alan O. Jamison, Subhadeep Gupta. 2011-01-26. Sympathetic cooling in an optically trapped mixture of alkali and spin-singlet atoms. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.106.153201

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