Deceleration of molecules in a supersonic beam by the optical field in a low-finesse cavity

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a supersonic molecular beam in a low-finesse optical cavity and demonstrate that most molecules in the beam can be decelerated to zero central velocity by the intracavity optical field in a process analogous to electrostatic Stark deceleration. We show that the rapid switching of the optical field for slowing the molecules is automatically generated by the cavity-induced dynamics. We further show that $\sim 1\%$ of the molecules can be optically trapped at a few millikelvin in the same cavity.

6 pages, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Master Equation for the Motion of a Polarizable Particle in a Multimode Cavity
• Cavity-induced phase stability to decelerate a fast molecular beam via feedback-controlled time-varying optical pumps