Towards single-laser cooling and trapping of transition metal elements using ablation beam sources

Quantum degenerate gases of transition metals are a promising platform for quantum simulation and precision measurement. Previous work suggests many of these atoms can be laser cooled out of a metastable excited state. We demonstrate a method for producing atomic beams of metastable Ti without optical pumping via laser ablation of a Ti sample into a room temperature buffer gas. We measure the inelastic collision rate between the metastable Ti atoms and buffer gas atoms to be on the order of 5000 times smaller than the elastic collision rate, enabling extraction of a metastable atomic beam from a buffer gas source. This lays out a path for laser cooling and trapping of several transition metal elements requiring only an ablation laser and a single laser for Doppler cooling. We measure metastable atom densities in our ablation cell of approximately 1e8 atoms/cm^3. Based simulations of a ablation-fed MOT, we expect to load on the order of 1e11 atom/sec in a 3D MOT.