2020/01/21 by Thomas Gantner, Manuel Koller, Xing Wu +2 · 18 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Buffer (optical fiber) #Buffer gas #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Computer simulation #Homogeneous #Molecule #Random walk #Strong Light-Matter Interactions #physics.atom-ph #physics.chem-ph #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1361-6455/ab8b42
published in Journal of Physics B Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics 53(14), 145302 (IOP Publishing)
arxiv created 2020/01/21 · openalex created_date 2020/01/30 · openalex publication_date 2020/04/20 · arxiv updated 2020/08/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract Cryogenic buffer gas cells have been a workhorse for the cooling of molecules in the last few decades. The straightforward sympathetic cooling principle makes them applicable to a huge variety of different species. Notwithstanding this success, detailed simulations of buffer gas cells are rare, and have never been compared to experimental data in the regime of low to intermediate buffer gas densities. Here, we present a numerical approach based on a trajectory analysis, with molecules performing a random walk in the cell due to collisions with a homogeneous buffer gas. This method can reproduce experimental flux and velocity distributions of molecules emerging from the buffer gas cell for varying buffer gas densities. This includes the strong decrease in molecule output from the cell for increasing buffer gas density and the so-called boosting effect, when molecules are accelerated by buffer-gas atoms after leaving the cell. The simulations provide various insights which could substantially improve buffer-gas cell design.