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AMPD: EPS AMPD
AMPD 8: Sitzung 8
AMPD 8.1: Talk
Thursday, April 5, 2001, 09:55–10:30, H104
Deceleration, trapping and storage of neutral molecules — •Gerard Meijer1,2, Hendrick L. Bethlem2, Floris M.H. Crompvoets2, and Rienk T. Jongma1,2 — 1FOM-institute for Plasma Physics ’Rijnhuizen’, P.O. Box 1207, 3430 BE Nieuwegein, The Netherlands — 2Dept. of Molecular and Laser Physics, University of Nijmegen, 6525 ED Nijmegen, The Netherlands
The emergence of methods for slowing and trapping gaseous species has led to a renaissance in atomic physics. By now, some methods to cool and trap molecules have appeared, and this renaissance is progressing into the field of molecular and chemical physics as well. In this presentation the operation principle of a linear decelerator in which time-varying inhomogeneous electric fields are applied to slow a gas pulse of dipolar molecules to arbitrarily low velocities (PRL 83 (1999) pg. 1558-1561, PRL 84 (2000) pg. 5744-5747) will be explained in detail. This method provides a fascinating novel tool for a large variety of molecular beam experiments. The so-called Stark decelerator has been used to generate slow packages of dipolar molecules for confinement in an electrostatic quadrupole trap (Nature 406 (2000) pg. 491-494), and for injection in a prototype storage ring for neutral molecules.