Experiments with strongly interacting Yb atoms in optical lattices

Recently, alkaline-earth (-like) atoms and alkaline earth metals (AEL) gained experimental and theoretical interest principally related to the possibility offered in metrological field by the excitation of visible and UV clock transitions. AEL atoms, in their neutral form and in the ground state, have a null total electronic momentum, resulting nearly insensitive to external magnetic fields. While the absence of magnetic coupling does not allow the simply interactions tuning by exploiting Feshbach resonances as it occurs in alkaline atoms, these atoms are characterized by highly symmetric ground states allowing the simulation of SU(N) systems. This characteristic, that can be attributed in AEL atoms to the decoupling between electronic and nuclear atomic momenta, can be exploited to perform quantum simulation of a wealth of novel systems and constitutes a fundamental property of isotopes that have a nonzero nuclear spin, as it occurs for all the fermionic species and in particular for 173Yb and 87Sr. This feature also ensures the absence of spin-changing collisions in ground state sublevels, implying that nuclear-spin mixtures are observationally stable. This attribute is fundamental for the study of transitions between different nuclear-spin states, for example by exploiting the two-photon Raman coupling. The degeneracy related to the SU(N) symmetry can be controllably removed by applying a two-photon Raman coupling, allowing for the simulation of systems with broken symmetries. Besides the possibility to induce couplings within the nuclear-spin degree of freedom, AEL atoms also offer the possibility to access a second, electronic degree of freedom; the possibility to address visible doubly-forbidden transitions between long-lived electronic clock states comprises a fantastic tool that allowed the building of optical lattice clocks improving metrological measurements and offering a richer platform for simulating complex systems. The main difference between the two internal degrees of freedom offered by AEL atoms is that the possibility to address ultranarrow optical clock transitions exists also for AEL bosonic isotopes in which the nuclear-spin degree of freedom is not present because the total atomic momentum is absent. The possibilities related to the excitation of long-lived metastable triplet levels, that, referring only to the lowest lying atomic levels are 3P(0;2) (in Russell-Saunders approximation they result doubly forbidden with respect to the electric dipole operator), are multiple. If bosonic atoms are considered, the metrological applications based on the clock transition at the state of the art have performances comparable to optical lattice clocks realized with fermionic isotopes. Bosonic isotopes, requiring external fields in order to excite transitions from the ground state to long-lived states, have been proposed as good candidates in order to build a reliable and fast system in which controllable qu-bits could be realized. Most of these applications, and in particular the possibility to create quantum computers with neutral atoms, crucially rely on the control of the scattering properties of atoms in different electronic states. Regarding fermionic isotopes, the clock transitions recently allowed for the demonstration of spin-orbit coupling and quantum simulation via the synthetic dimension approach. As recently discovered, the clock transitions from the ground to the 3P(0;2) states give rise to rich interactions possibilities between atoms in the fundamental and in the metastable states. The spin-exchange interaction that has been observed between ground and metastable states, supports also a new kind of Feshbach resonance, called Orbital Feshbach Resonance (OrbFR). As occurs in magnetic Feshbach resonances for alkali atoms, also the OrbFR, that occurs in AEL atoms, supports the existence of extremely shallow homonuclear molecules. After considering the (s-wave) scattering parameters of all the AEL atoms that have been characterized experimentally, 173Yb is the only isotope in which the production and manipulation of Orbital Feshbach molecules (produced e.g. with photoassociation) is experimentally viable. Molecules generated by employing this atom, may lead to the investigation of fermionic superfluidity in still-unexplored regimes. In this thesis we report the characterization of interactions in bosonic 174Yb isotope by probing the clock transition between the singlet 1S0 ground state and the triplet 3P0 metastable excited state. Interactions and inelastic losses between ground-state and excited metastable-state atoms have been experimentally determined with high accuracy, resulting consistent with an indipendent evaluation realized in the same period by Yb BEC group at LKB. The obtained values for the interactions among ground and metastable atoms for the specified isotope constitute a first step in order to design an experimental system in which quantum information can be realized by means of exploiting the clock transition of bosonic Yb atoms. This work, by exploiting the internal degrees of freedom of 173Yb atoms, reports a study on Orbital Feshbach molecules, showing experimentally the possibility to employ the nuclear degree of freedom in 173Yb atoms to manipulate and precisely detect homo-nuclear photoassociated molecules. This first result regarding this new kind of shallow-bound molecules allowed the characterization of interactions between ground-state and metastable-state of 173Yb atoms. This first intensive study of orbital Feshbach molecules is a fundamental step for future studies on the possibilities offered by these homo-nuclear molecules. Finally, we exploited the ground state SU(N) symmetry and its controlled breaking via Raman coupling (in 173Yb N = 1...6) to simulate the physical processes that are supposed to be driven by the hybridation of d-orbitals of iron atoms in iron based-superconductors, in which orbital-selective Mott insulating phases have been experimentally observed and are suspected to be the fundamental ingredient to achieve high-temperature superconductivity in these compounds.