REAu4Al8Si (RE = Ce-Gd, and Yb) is the end member of a new series of intermetallic structures grown from aluminium flux; this new structure contains thick AuAl2 slabs and the ytterbium analog exhibits mixed-valent behavior.

Lifetimes of twenty-one excited states in atomic Yb were measured using time-resolved fluorescence detection following pulsed laser excitation. The lifetime of the 4f145d6s D1 state, which is of particular importance for a proposed study of parity nonconservation in atoms, was measured to be 380(30) ns.

A stable light source obtained using sum-frequency generation (SFG) is developed for high-resolution spectroscopy at 578 nm. Hyperfine transitions of molecular iodine are observed by using the SFG light source with saturation spectroscopy. The light source is frequency stabilized to the observed hyperfine transition and achieves a stability of 2x10(-12) for a 1-s averaging time. The absolute fr...

i Preface ii

Available online 23 July 2011

We study sympathetic cooling of the radial ion motion in a linear RF trap mixed barium-ytterbium chains. Barium ions are Doppler-cooled, while ytterbium cooled through their interaction with cold barium ions. estimate efficiency by measuring average occupation quantum numbers, and thus temperature, all normal modes chain. The full set orderings chain two have been probed, we show that thermal n...

We demonstrate the active wavefront control of a 19-core ytterbium-doped fiber amplifier by the digital holography technique. The output wavefront is corrected even in the presence of large externally induced perturbations, with a measured output Strehl ratio of 0.6 in all cases. The wavefront-controlled multicore fiber is used to amplify 800 ps pulses at 1064 nm at a repetition rate of 40?kHz,...

Nowadays atomic optical lattice clocks can perform frequency measurements with a fractional uncertainty at the 10 level in few hours of measurement, outperforming the best caesium (Cs) standards operated in the world. Since the definition of the unit of time is based on Cs, a worldwide debate about the need to promote the redefinition of the second on a optical reference is under-way. At INRIM ...

We report the observation of electromagnetically induced transparency in a sample of cryogenically cooled ground-state atomic ytterbium ((1)S(0)). The transparency is produced due to coherence between the optical field and the nuclear spin state of the (173)Yb nucleus. Because the nuclear spin states interact very weakly with their environment, they are resistant to decoherence due to inelastic...