Design and Construction of a Dual Erbium-Potassium Experiment

Lucas Hofer - Christ Church College - University of Oxford
2020 - PhD 1^st year report

This report details my work towards the construction of a dual species erbium potassium ultracold machine done in the first year of my DPhil. Although I was involved in a number of disparate projects, this report focuses on the experiment’s imaging systems, as well as the design and initial construction of the potassium addition. First, an absorption imaging setup was constructed and an image analysis GUI written which allows experimental parameters such as atom number and temperature to be extracted from the images. Second the vacuum, magnetic field and laser systems to create a 2D+ MOT were designed to laser cool either 41K or 39K. The dual-species machine will allow novel impurity physics experiments to be undertaken including the search for exotic Bose polarons and the exploration of non-Markovian quantum information systems—both of which take advantage of the dipole-dipole interactions afforded by the erbium bath.