Progress towards long-range Rydberg molecules with \textsuperscript{87}Sr

Many recent experiments have probed the interactions between highly-excited Rydberg atoms and nearby ground state atoms, allowing the study of a wide range of phenomena such as few-body, long-range Rydberg molecules in thermal gases\footnote{V. Bendkowsky \textit{et al.}, Nature (London) \textbf{458}, 1005 (2008).}\textsuperscript{,}\footnote{B. J. DeSalvo \textit{et al.}, Phys. Rev. A \textbf{92}, 031403 (2015).} ($\sim 10^{13}\text{cm}^{-3}$) and many-body effects in Bose-Einstein condensates\footnote{M. Schlagmüller \textit{et al.}, Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{116}, 053001 (2016).} ($\sim 10^{14}\text{cm}^{-3}$). These experiments have exclusively been performed with bosons. We report our results working with the fermionic isotope \textsuperscript{87}Sr ($I=9/2$) with which one can hope to see modified molecular structure and suppression of short-range collisional loss due to the Pauli exclusion principle. We will describe the spectra for two-photon excitation to the $5sns\,\textsuperscript{3}S\textsubscript{1}$ Rydberg state from a spin-polarized sample and our progress towards obtaining Rydberg molecular spectra.