Many-body physics in degenerate alkali-lanthanide mixtures

Ultracold atomic mixtures have unlocked unprecedented opportunities to investigate few and many-body physics. With a degenerate alkali-lanthanide mixture, phenomena ranging from long-range phonon-mediated interactions, emergent pattern formations, collective spin physics, and impurity physics can be explored. Here we report a robust device that can generate a degenerate mixture of erbium and lithium atoms. The strong dipolar interactions, accessible selection of isotopes, and suitable inter and intra-species Feshbach resonances of the mixture make erbium and lithium an ideal system to work with. We image the mixture with a 0.6 NA high-resolution microscope objective.