Photoassociation of Fermionic ⁸⁷Sr via the ¹S₀ - ¹P₁ Transition

The fermionic isotope of strontium, ⁸⁷Sr, is of interest for the development of optical frequency standards and the study of quantum many-body phenomena. In many of these experiments, ⁸⁷Sr is confined in an optical lattice. Detecting the presence of doubly occupied lattice sites is a valuable tool for studies of atomic gases in optical lattices, and this is typically done with photoassociation, in which two gound-state atoms in a scattering state are photo-excited to a molecular state. No resonance frequencies have been reported for transitions to molecular states of any excited electronic potential for ⁸⁷Sr. Here we present results for photoassociation of ⁸⁷Sr atoms via the ¹S₀ - ¹P₁ transition at 461nm (Γ=(2π*30.5)s−1), and measurements of optical lengths for select photoassociation spectra.