A Three-Dimensional Optical Lattice of Ytterbium and Lithium Atomic Gas Mixture

We develop an optical lattice system for an ultracold atomic gas mixture of ytterbium (174Yb) and lithium (6Li), which is an ideal system for studying disorder and impurity problems. We load a Bose–Einstein condensate of 174Yb into a three-dimensional optical lattice and observe its interference patterns in time-of-flight (TOF) images. Furthermore, we perform laser spectroscopy of 174Yb in an optical lattice using the ultranarrow optical transition 1S0–3P2 in both cases with and without 6Li. Owing to the weak interspecies interaction, we do not observe clear effects of 6Li in the obtained interference patterns or excitation spectra. However, this is an important first step in the optical control of atomic impurity in ultracold fermions. We also measure the polarizabilities of the 3P2 state of 174Yb atoms in an optical trap with a wavelength of 1070 nm. We reveal that the polarizability can be tuned to be positive, zero, or the same as the ground state, which is useful for certain applications.