Ytterbium atoms in optical tweezers for fermionic many-body physics

We present an overview of our recently constructed ytterbium tweezer platform in Trieste, where we aim to perform single-atom resolved quantum simulations of many-body fermionic systems, with special emphasis on quantum impurity problems. In our experiment, we load a tweezer array from a narrow-line MOT operating in a five-beam (5B) configuration, so far demonstrated only for lanthanides. In the 5B MOT the sixth beam is replaced by the action of gravity, which is highly advantageous for setups where high-NA microscope objectives are limiting optical access for cooling beams. We demonstrate direct loading of tweezer arrays from the 5B MOT for all Yb isotopes. We show recent results on single-atom imaging based on a weakly-destructive fast scheme featuring alternated counterpropagating pulses at 399 nm resonant with the broad 1S0-1P1 transition. We also employ this technique to detect single and multiple atoms in free space for variable time-of-flights. In the near future we will prepare mesoscopic ensembles and exploit the clock transition to investigate fermionic impurities in and out-of-equilibrium.