A Three-Dimensional Optical Lattice of Ytterbium and Lithium Atomic Mixture

Abstract

We develop an optical lattice system for an ultracold atomic gas mixture of ytterbium (174Yb) and lithium (6Li), which is an ideal system to study disorder and impurity problems. We load a Bose-Einstein condensate of 174Yb into a three-dimensional optical lattice and observe the interference patterns in time-of-flight (TOF) images. Furthermore, we perform a laser spectroscopy of 174Yb in an optical lattice using the ultra-narrow optical transition 1S0-3P2 in both cases with and without 6Li. Due to the weak interspecies interaction, we do not observe the clear influences of 6Li in the obtained interference patterns and the excitation spectra. However, this is an important first step of optical control of atomic impurity in ultracold fermions. We also measure the polarizabilities of the 3P2 state of 174Yb atoms in an optical trap with a wavelength of 1070 nm. We reveal that the polarizability can be tuned to positive, zero, or the same as the ground state, which are useful for certain applications.