We report on an apparatus for cooling and trapping of neutral dysprosium. We characterize and optimize the performance of our Zeeman slower and 2D molasses cooling of the atomic beam by means of Doppler spectroscopy on a 136 kHz broad transition at 626 nm. Furthermore, we demonstrate the characterization and optimization procedure for the loading phase of a magneto-optical trap (MOT) by increasing the effective laser linewidth by sideband modulation. After optimization of the MOT compression phase, we cool and trap up to 10 9 atoms within 3 seconds in the MOT at temperatures of 9 µK and phase space densities of 1.7·10 −5 , which constitutes an ideal starting point for loading the atoms into an optical dipole trap and for subsequent forced evaporative cooling.

We report on sawtooth wave adiabatic passage (SWAP) slowing of bosonic and fermionic dysprosium isotopes by using a 136 kHz wide transition at 626 nm. A beam of precooled atoms is further decelerated in one dimension by the SWAP force and the amount of atoms at near zero velocity is measured. We demonstrate that the SWAP slowing can be twice as fast as in a conventional optical molasses operated on the same transition. In addition, we investigate the parameter range for which the SWAP force is efficiently usable in our set-up, and relate the results to the adiabaticity condition. Furthermore, we add losses to the hyperfine ground-state population of fermionic dysprosium during deceleration and observe more robust slowing with SWAP compared to slowing with the radiation pressure force.