Novel cooling schemes for atomic strontium

Due to its extremely narrow electronic transition and the decoupling between its nuclear spin from the electronic angular momentum, Sr has been featured in a number of Quantum Simulation proposals [1,2]. With the demonstrated capability in precision measurement and control from ongoing optical clock experiments, a key challenge to these quantum information experiments is the creation of high phase space density samples of both bosonic and fermionic Sr atoms at a high duty cycle. Here we report our recent progress in exploring novel cooling schemes with $^{88}Sr$. Recent results in employing Optical Feshbach Resonances for turning on interactions between atoms are presented and future experiments with narrow line laser cooling are discussed. \\[4pt] [1] A.J. Daley et al.\ 2008, 101, 170504\\[0pt] [2] A.V. Gorshkov et al.\ 2009, 102, 110503