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Light-assisted collisions in tweezer-trapped lanthanides

D. S. Grün1,2,*, L. Bellinato Giacomelli1,*, A. Tashchilina1,2, R. Donofrio1,2, F. Borchers1,2, T. Bland1,3, M. J. Mark1,2, and F. Ferlaino1,2,†

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †Contact author: Francesca.Ferlaino@uibk.ac.at
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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 023067 – Published 22 April, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/rkn3-8rc9

Abstract

We present a quantitative investigation of one- and two-body light-mediated processes that occur to few erbium atoms in an optical tweezer, when exposed to near-resonant light. In order to study the intertwined effects of recoil heating, cooling, and light-assisted collisions, we develop a first-principles Monte Carlo algorithm that solves the coupled dynamics of both the internal and external degrees of freedom of the atoms. After validating our theoretical model against experimental data, we use the predictive power of our code to guide our experiment and, in particular, we explore the performance of different transitions of erbium for light-assisted collisions in terms of their efficiency and fidelity for single-atom preparation.

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 023067– Published 22 April, 2026
  • Received 5 June 2025
  • Accepted 26 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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