State-of-the-art ab initio techniques have been applied to compute the potential energy 
curves for the SrYb molecule in the Born-Oppenheimer approximation for the ground state 
and first fifteen excited singlet and triplet states within the coupled-cluster 
framework. The leading long-range coefficients describing the dispersion interactions at
large interatomic distances are also reported. The electric transition dipole moments 
have been obtained as the first residue of the polarization propagator computed with the
linear response coupled-cluster method restricted to single and double excitations. 
Spin-orbit coupling matrix elements have been evaluated using the multireference 
configuration interaction method restricted to single and double excitations with a 
large active space. The electronic structure data was employed to investigate the 
possibility of forming deeply bound ultracold SrYb molecules in an optical lattice in a 
photoassociation experiment using continuous-wave lasers. Photoassociation near the 
intercombination line transition of atomic strontium into the vibrational levels of the 
strongly spin-orbit mixed b³S?, a³?, A¹?, and C¹? states with subsequent efficient 
stabilization into the v’’=1 vibrational level of the electronic ground state is 
proposed. Ground state SrYb molecules can be accumulated by making use of collisional 
decay from v’’=1 to v’’=0. Alternatively, photoassociation and stabilization to v’’=0 
can proceed via stimulated Raman adiabatic passage provided that the trapping frequency 
of the optical lattice is large enough and phase coherence between the pulses can be 
maintained over at least tens of microseconds.