Photoassociation Spectroscopy of Laser-Cooled Ytterbium Atoms
- 15 September 2004
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review Letters
- Vol. 93 (12), 123202
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.93.123202
Abstract
We report the photoassociation spectroscopy of laser-cooled ytterbium atoms in an optical trap. We observed more than 90 photoassociation resonances of vibrational levels in the state, including 80 consecutive series, up to 490 GHz detuning with respect to the atomic resonance. From the resonance frequencies we derived the atomic radiative lifetime of the state to be , which is about 2 orders of magnitude improvement over previous results. We also observed line broadening of resonances, which is ascribed to the predissociation to the triplet states, and estimated the transition probability to be 0.2. Furthermore, we observed the decrease of the photoassociation signal intensity, from which the scattering length is estimated to be equal to or less than 3 nm.
Keywords
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