Stopping paramagnetic supersonic beams: the advantage of a co-moving magnetic trap decelerator


  Etay Lavert Ofir  
Department of chemical phyisics
Weizmann Insitute

A long standing goal of chemical physics is to observe reactions at low ~1K temperatures where the quantum effects are expected to dominate reaction dynamics. The progress in the field has been partially hampered by the absence of methods that provide dense enough samples of cold atoms and molecules. We present a new source of cold paramagnetic atoms and molecules where paramagnetic particles are cooled during an adiabatic expansion and become entrained in an intense, cold but fast supersonic beam. We efficiently decelerate the paramagnetic particles by trapping them in a co-moving decelerating magnetic trap. We present our results on deceleration in a moving magnetic trap by bringing metastable Neon atoms to near rest. We show that the phase space region containing the decelerating species is larger by almost three orders of magnitude as compared to other available deceleration methods.