Related papers: Continuous Centrifuge Decelerator for Polar Molecu…
The Stark interaction of polar molecules with an inhomogeneous electric field is exploited to select slow molecules from a room-temperature reservoir and guide them into an ultrahigh vacuum chamber. A linear electrostatic quadrupole with a…
Experiments with cold molecules usually begin with a molecular source. We describe the construction and characteristics of a cryogenic buffer gas source of CaF molecules. The source emits pulses with a typical duration of 240 $\mu$s, a mean…
We study the dynamics of a supersonic molecular beam in a low-finesse optical cavity and demonstrate that most molecules in the beam can be decelerated to zero central velocity by the intracavity optical field in a process analogous to…
Precise manipulation of single molecules has already led to remarkable insights in physics, chemistry, biology and medicine. However, widespread adoption of single-molecule techniques has been impeded by equipment cost and the laborious…
An optical centrifuge is a laser pulse which enables controlled rotational excitation of molecules. Centrifuged molecules rotating with well-defined angular frequencies are ideal candidates to probe many-body quantum systems at the…
We employ laser cooling to intensify and cool an atomic beam of metastable Ne(3s) atoms. Using several collimators, a slower and a compressor we achieve a ^{20}Ne^* flux of 6 10^{10} atoms/s in an 0.7 mm diameter beam traveling at 100 m/s,…
Stark deceleration allows for precise control over the velocity of a pulsed molecular beam and, by the nature of its limited phase-space acceptance, reduces the energy width of the decelerated packet. We describe an alternate method of…
Reaching high densities is a key step towards cold-collision experiments with polyatomic molecules. We use a cryofuge to load up to 2$\times10^7$ CH$_3$F molecules into a box-like electric trap, achieving densities up to 10$^7$/cm$^3$ at…
Zeeman deceleration is a relatively new technique used to obtain full control over the velocity of paramagnetic atoms or molecules in a molecular beam. We present a detailed description of a multistage Zeeman decelerator that has recently…
We report the observation of collective-emission-induced, velocity-dependent light forces. One third of a falling sample containing 3 x 10^6 cesium atoms illuminated by a horizontal standing wave is stopped by cooperatively emitting light…
Slow beams of neutral molecules are of great interest for a wide range of applications, from cold chemistry through precision measurements to tests of the foundations of quantum mechanics. We report on the quantitative observation of…
A fast packet of cold atoms is coupled into a magnetic guide and subsequently slowed down by reflection on a magnetic potential barrier ('mirror') moving along the guide. A detailed characterization of the resulting decelerated packet is…
We demonstrate and characterize a cryogenic buffer gas-cooled molecular beam source capable of producing bright beams of free radicals and refractory species. Details of the beam properties (brightness, forward velocity distribution,…
Electric deflection measurements on liquid helium nanodroplets doped with individual polar molecules demonstrate that the cold superfluid matrix enables full orientation of the molecular dipole along the external field. This translates into…
High fluxes of cold polar molecules are efficiently produced by electric guiding and velocity filtering. Here, we investigate different aspects of the beam formation. Variations of the source parameters such as density and temperature…
Cold supersonic beams of molecules can be slowed down using a switched sequence of electrostatic field gradients. The energy to be removed is proportional to the mass of the molecules. Here we report deceleration of YbF, which is 7 times…
It has been roughly three decades since laser cooling techniques produced ultracold atoms, leading to rapid advances in a vast array of fields. Unfortunately laser cooling has not yet been extended to molecules because of their complex…
We demonstrate experimentally the continuous and pulsed loading of a slow and cold atomic beam into a magnetic guide. The slow beam is produced using a vapor loaded laser trap, which ensures two-dimensional magneto-optical trapping, as well…
We present a novel slowing scheme for beams of laser-coolable diatomic molecules reminiscent of Zeeman slowing of atomic beams. The scheme results in efficient compression of the 1-dimensional velocity distribution to velocities trappable…
Recently, the quest for an ultracold and dense ensemble of polar molecules has attracted strong interest. Polar molecules have bright prospects for novel quantum gases with long-range and anisotropic interactions, for quantum information…