Evaporative Cooling of Helium Nanodroplets with Angular Momentum Conservation

Abstract

Evaporative cooling of helium nanodroplets is studied with a statistical rate model that includes, for the first time, angular momentum conservation as a constraint on the accessible droplet states. It is found that while the final temperature of the droplets is almost identical to that previously predicted and later observed, the distribution of total droplet energy and angular momentum states is vastly more excited than a canonical distribution at the same temperature. It is found that the final angular momentum of the droplets is highly correlated with the initial direction, and that a significant fraction of the alignment of the total angular momentum should be transferred to the rotational angular momentum of an embedded molecule.

4 pages including 2 figures. As submitted to Physical Review Letters

References in corpus (3)

• Helium nanodroplet isolation ro-vibrational spectroscopy: methods and recent results
• Energetics and Possible Formation and Decay Mechanisms of Vortices in Helium Nanodroplets
• Microcanonical Thermodynamic Properties of Helium Nanodroplets

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• Direct observation of interatomic Coulombic decay and subsequent ion-atom scattering in helium nanodroplets
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• Density of states of helium droplets