Tunable, species-dependent traps for degenerate mixtures

Mixtures of degenerate gases are a platform for creating and studying polar molecules, impurities in a BEC and are promising candidates for implementing novel cooling schemes to reduce the entropy of a lattice gas. While a number of degenerate mixtures have been produced in a variety of different traps, independent control of the trap parameters for each species remains challenging and is often crucial to perform efficient cooling. 

 

This talk will discuss the implementation of a tunable, species-selective trap for rubidium and ytterbium atoms and present two experiments performed towards this goal. This first is a precision measurement of a tune-out wavelength in rubidium where its AC stark shift vanishes. The second experiment uses this wavelength of light to form a species-dependent trap and bring a gas of bosonic rubidium-87 and fermionic ytterbium-171 atoms to degeneracy.