Fast microscopy of cold Yb at LMU!

We obtained our first microscope images with ¹⁷¹Yb

A key feature of our new ¹⁷¹Yb experiment is fast repetition rates on the order of 1Hz. To this end we directly load laser-cooled atoms from a magneto-optical trap into a deep 3D optical lattice at the clock-magic wavelength at 759nm. We then use our recently developed chirped clock-sideband cooling in order to reach extremely low temperaturs with motional excitations <0.1n. If you want to learn more about this technique, have a look at our recent paper, which is about to appear in Phys. Rev. Res. We then isolate a single plane and image the atoms in the deep clock-magic lattice.