Operation of a Stark decelerator with optimum acceptance

Abstract

With a Stark decelerator, beams of neutral polar molecules can be accelerated, guided at a constant velocity, or decelerated. The effectiveness of this process is determined by the 6D volume in phase space from which molecules are accepted by the Stark decelerator. Couplings between the longitudinal and transverse motion of the molecules in the decelerator can reduce this acceptance. These couplings are nearly absent when the decelerator operates such that only every third electric field stage is used for deceleration, while extra transverse focusing is provided by the intermediate stages. For many applications, the acceptance of a Stark decelerator in this so-called $s=3$ mode significantly exceeds that of a decelerator in the conventionally used ($s=1$) mode. This has been experimentally verified by passing a beam of OH radicals through a 2.6 meter long Stark decelerator. The experiments are in quantitative agreement with the results of trajectory calculations, and can qualitatively be explained with a simple model for the 6D acceptance. These results imply that the 6D acceptance of a Stark decelerator in the $s=3$ mode of operation approaches the optimum value, i.e. the value that is obtained when any couplings are neglected.

13 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Cold Molecule Spectroscopy for Constraining the Evolution of the Fine Structure Constant
• Deceleration and electrostatic trapping of OH radicals
• Ultracold dipolar gases - a challenge for experiments and theory
• Direct measurement of the radiative lifetime of vibrationally excited OH radicals
• The radiative lifetime of metastable CO ($a^3\Pi ,v=0$)
• Optical pumping of trapped neutral molecules by blackbody radiation
• Trapping molecules on a chip in traveling potential wells
• Mitigation of loss within a molecular Stark decelerator
• Improved alternating gradient transport and focusing of neutral molecules
• Compact in-place gate valve for molecular beam experiments

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