Creation of a degenerate Bose-Bose mixture of erbium and lithium atoms
Phys. Rev. A 113, 013321 – Published 13 January, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/jq84-tb52
Abstract
We report the realization of a degenerate mixture of and atoms in their energetically lowest spin states. The two species are sequentially laser cooled and loaded into an optical dipole trap and then transported to a glass cell and simultaneously evaporated to degeneracy. Er serves as the coolant for Li, and we observe efficient sympathetic cooling facilitated by a large interspecies elastic scattering cross section. Three-body losses are found to be small, making this platform promising for the study of interacting mixtures with large mass imbalance.
