English

Traveling-wave deceleration of SrF molecules

Atomic Physics 2014-06-23 v1 Chemical Physics

Abstract

We report on the production, deceleration and detection of a SrF molecular beam. The molecules are captured from a supersonic expansion and are decelerated in the X2Σ+(v=0,N=1)^2\Sigma^+ (v=0, N=1) state. We demonstrate the removal of up to 40% of the kinetic energy with a 2 meter long modular traveling-wave decelerator. Our results demonstrate a crucial step towards the preparation of ultracold gases of heavy diatomic molecules for precision spectroscopy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1402.2800,
  title  = {Traveling-wave deceleration of SrF molecules},
  author = {J. E. van den Berg and S. C. Mathavan and C. Meinema and J. Nauta and T. H. Nijbroek and K. Jungmann and H. L. Bethlem and S. Hoekstra},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1402.2800},
  year   = {2014}
}