Cold free radical molecules in the laboratory frame

Abstract

A special class of molecules that are important to many subfields in molecular dynamics and chemical physics, namely free radical molecules, now enjoy a significant degree of center-of-mass motion control in the laboratory frame. The example reported in this paper concerns hydroxyl radical (OH), which, after the internal degrees of freedom are cooled in a supersonic expansion, has been bunched, accelerated, and slowed using time-varying inhomogeneous electric fields. In situ observations of laser-induced fluorescence along the beam propagation path allows for detailed characterization of the longitudinal phase-space manipulation of OH molecules by the electric fields. The creation of a pulse containing 1e3 to 1e6 molecules possessing a longitudinal velocity spread from 2 to 80 m/s around a mean laboratory velocity variable from 550 m/s to rest with only a few mm spatial extent represents an exciting and useful new experimental capability for exploring free radical dynamics. This paper offers the most detailed study of the Stark deceleration dynamics to date.

20 pages + 17 figures

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Cited by in corpus (28)

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• Condensed Matter Theory of Dipolar Quantum Gases
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• Cold Molecule Spectroscopy for Constraining the Evolution of the Fine Structure Constant
• Manipulation of Molecules with Electromagnetic Fields
• Deceleration and electrostatic trapping of OH radicals
• Formation and interactions of cold and ultracold molecules: new challenges for interdisciplinary physics
• Magneto-electrostatic trapping of ground state OH molecules
• Calculations of static dipole polarizabilities of alkali dimers. Prospects for alignment of ultracold molecules
• Production of cold formaldehyde molecules for study and control of chemical reaction dynamics with hydroxyl radicals
• Low-energy molecular collisions in a permanent magnetic trap
• Ultracold Rb-OH collisions and prospects for sympathetic cooling
• Cold heteromolecular dipolar collisions
• Dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates with dipole-dependent scattering length
• Dipolar Bose gases: Many-body versus mean-field description
• Cold collisions of OH and Rb. I: the free collision
• Pseudo-potential treatment of two aligned dipoles under external harmonic confinement
• Mitigation of loss within a molecular Stark decelerator
• Formation of molecular oxygen in ultracold O + OH reaction
• Cavity cooling of translational and ro-vibrational motion of molecules: ab initio-based simulations for OH and NO
• Advanced switching schemes in a Stark decelerator
• Ground-state OH molecule in combined electric and magnetic fields: Analytic solution of the effective Hamiltonian
• Beyond the Limits of Conventional Stark Deceleration
• Theoretical study of the quenching of NH (singlet Delta) molecules via collisions with Rb atoms: preliminary results
• Repeating head-on collisions in an optical trap and the evaluation of spin-dependent interactions among neutral particles
• Analytical study of level crossings in the Stark-Zeeman spectrum of ground state OH
• Mutual dipolar drag in a bilayer Fermi gas
• Spin squeezing an ultracold molecule