Cooling and trapping of ultracold strontium isotopic mixtures -: art. no. 061403

We present the simultaneous cooling and trapping of an isotopic mixture in a magneto-optical trap and describe the transfer of the mixture into a conservative, far-off-resonant dipole trap. The mixture is prepared with a technique that applies to intermediate and heavy alkaline-earth-metal-like atoms. In this work, Sr-88 and Sr-86 are simultaneously loaded first into the magneto-optical trap operated on the S-1(0)-P-3(1) spin-forbidden line at 689 nm, and then transferred into the dipole trap. We observe fast interspecies thermalization in the dipole trap which allows one to set a lower bound on the Sr-88-Sr-86 elastic cross section.