Photoassociation of Fermionic ${}^{87}$Sr via the ${}^{1}$S$_0$ - ${}^{1}$P$_1$ Transition

The fermionic isotope of strontium, ${}^{87}$Sr, is of interest for the development of optical frequency standards and the study of quantum many-body phenomena. In many of these experiments, ${}^{87}$Sr 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 ${}^{87}$Sr. Here we present results for photoassociation of ${}^{87}$Sr atoms via the ${}^{1}$S$_0$ - ${}^{1}$P$_1$ transition at 461nm ($\Gamma = (2\pi*30.5) s^{-1}$), and measurements of optical lengths for select photoassociation spectra.