Production and stabilization of a spin mixture of ultracold dipolar Bose gases
Mixtures of ultracold gases with long-range interactions are expected to open new avenues in the study of quantum matter. Natural candidates for this research are spin mixtures of atomic species with large magnetic moments. However, the lifetime of such assemblies can be strongly affected by the dipolar relaxation that occurs in spin-flip collisions. Here we present experimental results for a mixture composed of the two lowest Zeeman states of Dy atoms, that act as dark states with respect to a light-induced quadratic Zeeman effect. We show that, due to an interference phenomenon, the rate for such inelastic processes is dramatically reduced with respect to the Wigner threshold law. Additionally, we determine the scattering lengths characterizing the s-wave interaction between these states, providing all necessary data to predict the miscibility range of the mixture, depending on its dimensionality.
More details on arXiv
Loss features in ultracold 162Dy gases: two- versus three-body processes
We quantitatively investigate the low-field (B<6G) loss features in ultracold thermal samples of 162Dy, revealing two- and three-body dominated loss processes. We investigate their temperature dependence and detect a feature compatible with a d-wave Fano-Feshbach resonance, which has not been observed before. We also analyse the expansion of the dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate as a function of the magnetic field and interpret the changes in size close to the resonances with a variation in the scattering length.
More details on Physical Review A (Editors’ suggestion)
Construction of the experimental setup
January 2023: Dysprosium atoms loaded into our optical crossed dipole trap!
July 2022: We got our first Dy MOT!
February 2022: First fluorescence signal from the oven on the 626 nm line (we have atoms!)
July 2021: The very first picture. Here we go!