Publications Daniel SCHNEIDER GRÜN

2025

D. Schneider Grün, L. Bellinato Giacomelli, A. Tashchilina, R. Donofrio, F. Borchers, T. Bland, M. J. Mark, F. Ferlaino Light-Assisted Collisions in Tweezer-Trapped Lanthanides, (2025-06-05), http://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.05123 doi:10.48550/arXiv.2506.05123
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.

D. Schneider Grün, S. White, A. Ortu, A. Di Carli, H. Edri, M. Lepers, M. J. Mark, F. Ferlaino Optical Tweezer Arrays of Erbium Atoms, Phys. Rev. Lett. 133 223402 (2024-11-26), http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.223402 doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.223402
We present the first successful trapping of single erbium atoms in an array of optical tweezers. Using a single narrow-line optical transition, we achieve deep cooling for direct tweezer loading, pairwise ejection, and continuous imaging without additional recoil suppression techniques. Our tweezer wavelength choice enables us to reach the magic trapping condition by tuning the ellipticity of the trapping light. Additionally, we implement an ultrafast high-fidelity fluorescence imaging scheme using a broad transition, allowing time-resolved study of the tweezer population dynamics from many to single atoms during light-assisted collisions. In particular, we extract a pair-ejection rate that qualitatively agrees with the semiclassical predictions by the Gallagher-Pritchard model. This Letter represents a promising starting point for the exploration of erbium as a powerful resource for quantum simulation in optical tweezers.