Ultracold Strontium

At the JQI, we're currently building an apparatus to trap and cool Strontium atoms.

Strontium has some nice atomic properties, which make it an ideal system to study.  One main advantage is it has very narrow atomic transitions, which are relatively insensitive to electromagnetic surroundings.  If Strontium atoms are trapped in an optical lattice, these narrow lines have made strontium in attractive choice for building very stable atomic clocks.  The combination of narrow lines, and the high nuclear spin of fermionic strontium can also be used as a quantum simulator, modeling the quantum mechanical behavior of novel materials such as superconductors, which are now the subjects of intense research because of their potential for major advances in computing and related fields.

Recently we achieved our first Bose-Einstein Condensate with strontium. Our first BEC was created using 86Sr, and was created using an optical dipoe trap.