Electrostatic deflection of a molecular beam of massive neutral particles: Fully field-oriented polar molecules within superfluid nanodroplets

Abstract

Electric deflection measurements on liquid helium nanodroplets doped with individual polar molecules demonstrate that the cold superfluid matrix enables full orientation of the molecular dipole along the external field. This translates into a deflection force which is increased enormously by comparison with typical deflection experiments, and it becomes possible to measurably deflect neutral doped droplets with masses of tens to hundreds of thousands of Daltons. This approach permits preparation and study of continuous fluxes of fully oriented polar molecules and is broadly and generally applicable, including to complex and biological molecules. It is shown that the dipole moments of internally cryogenically cold molecules can be directly determined from a deflection measurement on the doped nanodroplet beam.

References in corpus (6)

• Spectroscopy and dynamics in helium nanodroplets
• Electrostatic extraction of cold molecules from a cryogenic reservoir
• Two-state wave packet for strong field-free molecular orientation
• Electric dipole moments of nanosolvated acid molecules in water clusters
• Adiabatic orientation of rotating dipole molecules in an external field
• Proton transfer in histidine-tryptophan heterodimers embedded in helium droplets

Cited by in corpus (4)

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• Probing the presence and absence of metal-fullerene electron transfer reactions in helium nanodroplets by deflection measurements
• Reflections on future problems in cluster science