Cooling of Exotic Atoms

Participants:

• John Doyle - PI
• S. Charles Doret - Graduate Student
• Cindy Hancox - Graduate Student
• Matthew Hummon - Graduate Student

Project Description:

Our recent work focuses on the cooling and magnetic trapping of atoms with anisotropic interactions. We use buffer gas cooling to  cool the atoms to sub-Kelvin temperatures where they can be confined by a 3 Tesla spherical quadrupole trap. 

The efficiency of buffer gas loading and evaporative cooling depends on the ratio of elasitic to inelastic collision rates of the atoms in the trap. In rare earth and transition metal atoms we observe a suppression of the inelastic collision rates from the electronic interaction anisotropy due to the submerged shell nature of the unpaired atomic electrons.  This suppression has allowed us to magnetically trap many of the rare earth atoms:  Tm, Er, Nd, Tb, Pr, Ho, and Dy.

Current version of poster:

Publications: