2007/05/23 by Brian C. Sawyer, Benjamin Stuhl, Benjamin K. Stuhl +5 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Fiber Laser Technologies #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #physics.atm-clus #physics.atom-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1140/epjd/e2008-00097-y
published as Eur. Phys. J. D 48, 197 (2008) · 13 pages, 17 figures
arxiv created 2007/05/23 · openalex publication_date 2008/05/15 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The transverse motion inside a Stark decelerator plays a large role in the total efficiency of deceleration. We differentiate between two separate regimes of molecule loss during the slowing process. The first mechanism involves distributed loss due to coupling of transverse and longitudinal motion, while the second is a result of the rapid decrease of the molecular velocity within the final few stages. In this work, we describe these effects and present means for overcoming them. Solutions based on modified switching time sequences with the existing decelerator geometry lead to a large gain of stable molecules in the intermediate velocity regime, but fail to address the loss at very low final velocities. We propose a new decelerator design, the quadrupole-guiding decelerator, which eliminates distributed loss due to transverse/longitudinal couplings throughout the slowing process and also exhibits gain over normal deceleration to the lowest velocities.