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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Isotope-agnostic motional ground-state cooling of neutral Yb atoms

Ronen M. Kroeze1,2, René A. Villela1,2, Er Zu1,2, Tim O. Höhn1,2, and Monika Aidelsburger1,2,3,*

  • *Contact author: Monika.Aidelsburger@mpq.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. Research 7, L042061 – Published 12 December, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/dts5-kxsx

Abstract

Efficient high-fidelity ground-state cooling of motional degrees of freedom is crucial for applications in quantum simulation, computing, and metrology. Here, we demonstrate direct ground-state cooling of fermionic Yb171 and bosonic Yb174 atoms in two- and three-dimensional magic-wavelength optical lattices on the ultranarrow clock transition. Its high spectral resolution offers the potential for reaching extremely low temperatures. To ensure efficient cooling, we develop a chirped sideband cooling scheme, where we sweep the clock-laser frequency to mitigate the effects of spatial trap inhomogeneities. We further generalize the theoretical description of sideband spectra to higher-dimensional lattices for precise thermometry. We achieve 2D ground-state fractions of 97% for Yb171 with an average motional occupation of n¯≃0.015 and provide a direct comparison with Yb174, reaching similar cooling performance. Applying the same scheme in 3D results in n¯≃0.15 limited by layer-to-layer inhomogeneities in the vertical direction. These results demonstrate efficient motional ground-state cooling in optical lattices, especially for bosonic alkaline-earth(-like) atoms, where other methods are not applicable, opening the door to novel protocols for quantum science applications with neutral atoms.

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Phys. Rev. Research 7, L042061– Published 12 December, 2025
  • Received 25 June 2025
  • Revised 18 September 2025
  • Accepted 10 November 2025
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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. Open access publication funded by Max Planck Society.

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