Accumulation of chromium metastable atoms into an optical trap

We report the fast accumulation of a large number of metastable 52Cr atoms in a mixed trap, formed by the superposition of a strongly confining optical trap and a quadrupolar magnetic trap. The steady state is reached after about 400 ms, providing a cloud of more than one million metastable atoms at a temperature of about 100 μK, with a peak density of 1018 atoms m-3. We have optimized the loading procedure, and measured the light shift of the 5D4 state by analyzing how the trapped atoms respond to a parametric excitation. We compare this result to a theoretical evaluation based on the available spectroscopic data for chromium atoms.