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We present the first successful trapping of single erbium atoms in an array of optical tweezers. Using a single narrow-line optical transition, we achieve deep cooling for direct tweezer loading, pairwise ejection, and continuous imaging without additional recoil suppression techniques. Our tweezer wavelength choice enables us to reach the magic trapping condition by tuning the ellipticity of the trapping light. Additionally, we implement an ultrafast high-fidelity fluorescence imaging scheme using a broad transition, allowing time-resolved study of the tweezer population dynamics from many to single atoms during light-assisted collisions. In particular, we extract a pair-ejection rate that qualitatively agrees with the semiclassical predictions by the Gallagher-Pritchard model. This Letter represents a promising starting point for the exploration of erbium as a powerful resource for quantum simulation in optical tweezers. locked icon locked icon locked icon locked icon locked icon locked icon locked icon locked icon Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)Atomic & molecular processes in external fieldsCold atoms & matter wavesCooling & trappingDipolar atoms
Grün et al. (Tue,) studied this question.