Getting a grip on the transverse motion in a Zeeman decelerator
- Laboratorium für Physikalische Chemie, ETH Zürich, 8093 Zürich (Switzerland)
- Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Faradayweg 4–6, 14195 Berlin, Germany and Laboratoire Aimé Cotton, CNRS, Université Paris-Sud, ENS Cachan, 91405 Orsay (France)
Zeeman deceleration is an experimental technique in which inhomogeneous, time-dependent magnetic fields generated inside an array of solenoid coils are used to manipulate the velocity of a supersonic beam. A 12-stage Zeeman decelerator has been built and characterized using hydrogen atoms as a test system. The instrument has several original features including the possibility to replace each deceleration coil individually. In this article, we give a detailed description of the experimental setup, and illustrate its performance. We demonstrate that the overall acceptance in a Zeeman decelerator can be significantly increased with only minor changes to the setup itself. This is achieved by applying a rather low, anti-parallel magnetic field in one of the solenoid coils that forms a temporally varying quadrupole field, and improves particle confinement in the transverse direction. The results are reproduced by three-dimensional numerical particle trajectory simulations thus allowing for a rigorous analysis of the experimental data. The findings suggest the use of a modified coil configuration to improve transverse focusing during the deceleration process.
- OSTI ID:
- 22253473
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Chemical Physics, Vol. 140, Issue 10; Other Information: (c) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0021-9606
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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