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Hyperfine and Zeeman optical pumping and transverse laser cooling of a thermal atomic beam of dysprosium using a single 421-nm laser

Rohan Chakravarthy1,2,*, Jonathan Agil1,2, Arijit Sharma3,4, Jung Bog Kim2,5,†, and Dmitry Budker1,2,6,‡

  • *Contact author: rohan.chakravarthy@ptb.de
  • †Contact author: jbkim@knue.ac.kr
  • ‡Contact author: budker@uni-mainz.de
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Phys. Rev. A 113, 033103 – Published 6 March, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/vnsn-pyd1

Abstract

We demonstrate the effect of Zeeman and hyperfine optical pumping and transverse laser cooling of a dysprosium (Dy) atomic beam on the 4f106s2(J=8)→4f106s6p(J=9) transition at 421.291 nm. For Dy163, a custom-built electro-optic modulator is used to generate five frequency sidebands required to pump the atoms to the F=10.5 ground-state hyperfine level, and the light polarization is chosen to pump the atoms to the mF=10.5 Zeeman sublevel. The atoms are simultaneously laser cooled using a standing wave orthogonal to the atomic beam. The resulting polarized and cooled atomic beam will be used in fundamental physics experiments taking advantage of the “accidental” degeneracy of excited states in Dy, including the ongoing measurement of parity violation in this system.

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Phys. Rev. A 113, 033103– Published 6 March, 2026
  • Received 3 March 2025
  • Accepted 2 February 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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