Magneto-optical trapping of mercury at high phase-space density (A7)

Quentin Lavigne, Thorsten Groh, Simon Stellmer:

Phys. Rev. A 105, 033106 (2022)

🔓 arXiv:2112.11556 (2021)

We present a realization of a magneto-optical trap of mercury atoms on the 1S03P1 intercombination line. We report on trapping of all stable mercury isotopes. We characterize the effect of laser detuning, laser intensity, and gradient field on the trapping performance of our system. The atom number for the most abundant isotope 202Hg is 5×107 atoms. Moreover, we study the difference in cooling processes for bosonic and fermionic isotopes. We observe agreement with the Doppler cooling theory for the bosonic species and show sub-Doppler cooling for the fermionic species. We reach a phase-space density of a few parts in 107, which constitutes a promising starting condition for dipole trap loading and evaporative cooling.