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Determination of the scattering length of erbium atoms

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Now published in PRA with collaborators from JILA, Boulder (Colorado, USA), we accurately determine the scattering length for the four bosonic erbium isotopes with highest abundance in the magnetic field range from 0G to 5G. We use the cross-dimensional thermalization technique and extract the scattering length by applying a fit of the complete Enskog equations of change and by utilizing an analytic formula for the so-called number of collisions per re-thermalization. We benchmark our results with the very accurate but experimentally more demanding lattice modulation spectroscopy, confirming the accuracy of our experimental protocol.

The paper can be accessed here: Phys. Rev. A, and the pre-print here: arXiv

Supersolids go round!

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In recent years a new state of matter has appeared on the scene: the supersolid. This has both the crystal structure of a solid and the properties of a superfluid, a quantum fluid that can flow without friction. We show that an established method for forming supersolids in a one-dimensional crystal–by tuning how the particles interact with one another–fails to reach supersolidity in two dimensions. However, by developing a new theoretical technique we demonstrate that cooling a gas of magnetic atoms directly into the supersolid regime is a viable method for creating two-dimensional supersolids in round, pancake-shaped traps. This leads us to the experimental observation of the first supersolid in a round trap, and opens the door to future theoretical studies of the crystal growth.

You can find out more about this in our paper.

Welcome to Antonio!

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At the beginning of May, Antonio Ortu joined our team as Post-Doc in the T-REQS lab, after completing the Ph.D. at the University of Geneva in Switzerland under the supervision of Mikael Afzelius. Welcome to Innsbruck, Antonio!

Inter-species interactions in an Er-Dy condensate

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We present a first study of the influence of the dipole-dipole interaction on the total inter-species interaction in our erbium-dysprosium mixture. In collaboration with M. Modugno from the University of the Basque Country, we develop a model for our heteronuclear mixture, which describes qualitatively well our system and allows us to predict a lower and an upper bound for the inter-species scattering length. With this work, we make the first steps toward the study of the experimentally unexplored miscibility-immiscibility phase diagram and the realization of quantum droplets and supersolid states in heteronuclear dipolar mixtures.

This work is now published as the editors’ suggestion in Phys. Rev. A [paper] [arXiv]

Elena awarded “Ho una laurea nella manica” prize

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Elena has been awarded the prize “Ho una laurea nella manica” established by her hometown for young people who graduated cum laude in 2020.

In the last few years the town of Spinea (Ve) established a prize for young students who got excellent results at University. Elena Poli was awarded the prize “Ho una laurea nella manica” for her master degree with honours at the University of Padova in 2020. There, she completed her bachelor and master degrees and she had the opportunity to work on her master thesis about “Quantum droplets and bright solitons in mixtures of Bose-Einstein condensates” under the supervision of Prof. Francesco Ancilotto.

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