A pulsed, low-temperature beam of supersonically cooled free radical OH molecules

Abstract

An improved system for creating a pulsed, low-temperature molecular beam of OH radicals has been developed. We use a pulsed discharge to create OH from H${}_2$O seeded in Xe during a supersonic expansion, where the high-voltage pulse duration is significantly shorter than the width of the gas pulse. The pulsed discharge allows for control of the mean speed of the molecular packet as well as maintains a low temperature supersonic expansion. A hot filament is placed in the source chamber to initiate the discharge for shorter durations and at lower voltages, resulting in a translationally and rotationally colder packet of OH molecules.

References in corpus (4)

• Phase Space Manipulation of Cold Free Radical OH Molecules
• Linking Ultracold Polar Molecules
• Methods for Constraining Fine Structure Constant Evolution with OH Microwave Transitions
• On the interaction of NH($X^3{\Sigma }^{-}$) molecules with rubidium atoms: implications for sympathetic cooling and the formation of extremely polar molecules

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• Penning collisions between supersonically expanded metastable helium atoms and laser-cooled lithium atoms
• Development and characterization of high-frequency sources for supersonic beams of fluorine radicals
• Single-Source, Collinear Merged-Beam Experiment for the Study of Reactive Neutral-Neutral Collisions