We report the creation of a confined slow beam of heavy-water (D2O) molecules with a translational temperature around 1 kelvin. This is achieved by filtering slow D2O from a thermal ensemble with inhomogeneous static electric fields exploiting the quadratic Stark shift of D2O. All previous demonstrations of electric field manipulation of cold dipolar molecules rely on a predominantly linear Stark shift. Further, on the basis of elementary molecular properties and our filtering technique we argue that our D2O beam contains molecules in only a few ro-vibrational states.
@article{arxiv.physics/0512119,
title = {Water vapor at a translational temperature of one kelvin},
author = {T. Rieger and T. Junglen and S. A. Rangwala and G. Rempe and P. W. H. Pinkse and J. Bulthuis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0512119},
year = {2009}
}