Magnetic trapping of ytterbium and the alkaline earths

Summary form only given. Atomic ytterbium (Yb), magnesium (Mg), calcium (Ca), and strontium (Sr) possess simple internal level structure and a diversity of naturally abundant fermionic and bosonic isotopes, making these atoms ideal testing grounds for cold collision theories and future studies of weakly-interacting quantum degenerate gases. Lacking useful magnetic ground-state sub-structure, however, these atoms cannot be driven into the quantum degenerate regime by pursuing the only proven strategy, ground-state magnetic trapping followed by forced RF evaporation. We propose a novel solution to this problem that involves magnetic trapping in the low-lying /sup 3/P/sub 2/ metastable excited state and demonstrate the possibility for deep magnetic traps using field gradients identical to those currently used for /sup 1/S/sub 0/-/sup 1/P/sub 1/ Yb and alkaline-earth magneto-optical traps.