Laser cooling and state transfer in fermionic Ti

Ti has two fermionic isotopes (47,49Ti) in natural abundance with nuclear spins 5/2 and 7/2. A major goal of our research program is to realize degenerate gases of these isotopes with the aim of studying spin-orbit coupled fermi-gases. Such systems are of interest to the field of many body physics and have possible applications to topological quantum computing. Unlike the bosonic isotopes for which magneto-optical trapping has been realized, the fermionic isotopes of Ti possess hyperfine structure which has hitherto been unmeasured in the states relevant to laser cooling and state transfer. In this talk we discuss experiments with fermionic 47,49Ti, including two significant technical advancements. First, measurements of the hyperfine structure of Ti allows for laser cooling using additional repump tones. Second, we discuss a method to transfer spin-polarized atoms from the metastable state out of which they are laser cooled to the ground electronic state.