2011/05/29 by Anders H. Hansen, Alexander Khramov, William H. Dowd +3 · 1 voice
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.quant-gas
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.84.011606
published as Phys. Rev. A 84, 011606(R) (2011) · 4 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2011/05/29 · arxiv published 2011/05/29 · arxiv updated 2015/05/28
We have produced a quantum degenerate mixture of fermionic alkali 6Li and bosonic spin-singlet 174Yb gases. This was achieved using sympathetic cooling of lithium atoms by evaporatively cooled ytterbium atoms in a far-off-resonant optical dipole trap. We observe co-existence of Bose condensed (T/Tc~0.8) 174Yb with 2.3*104 atoms and Fermi degenerate (T/TF~0.3) 6Li with 1.2*104 atoms. Quasipure Bose-Einstein condensates of up to 3*104 174Yb atoms can be produced in single-species experiments. Our results mark a significant step toward studies of few and many-body physics with mixtures of alkali and alkaline-earth-like atoms, and for the production of paramagnetic polar molecules in the quantum regime. Our methods also establish a convenient scheme for producing quantum degenerate ytterbium atoms in a 1064nm optical dipole trap.