Efficient creation of dipolar ¹⁶⁸Er Bose-Einstein condensates for quantum simulation

Lanthanide atoms such as erbium and dysprosium, are excellent systems for the study of quantum many-body physics due to their considerable magnetic moment from the large angular momentum. To explore such a dipolar system, we create degenerate erbium quantum gases in a newly developed apparatus, in which diverse cold-atom toolkits including a narrow-line optical transition, a Feshbach resonance, and a metastable excited state are easily available. I will discuss how we efficiently prepare degenerate dipolar quantum gases of ¹⁶⁸Er using the two-stage slower followed by the evaporative cooling in a crossed dipole trap, as well as on-going experiments with dipolar atoms.