Continuous guided beams of slow and internally cold polar molecules

TL;DR

This paper presents a method combining buffer-gas cooling and electrostatic filtering to produce continuous, slow, and internally cold polar molecular beams, with detailed technical insights and demonstrations of versatility.

Contribution

It introduces an optimized cryogenic source for continuous guided polar molecule beams, enhancing flux and internal cooling, and demonstrates its application to various molecular species.

Findings

High-flux continuous guided beams achieved

Effective internal cooling of molecules demonstrated

Versatile production of different molecular species

Abstract

We describe the combination of buffer-gas cooling with electrostatic velocity filtering to produce a high-flux continuous guided beam of internally cold and slow polar molecules. In a previous paper (L.D. van Buuren et al., arXiv:0806.2523v1) we presented results on density and state purity for guided beams of ammonia and formaldehyde using an optimized set-up. Here we describe in more detail the technical aspects of the cryogenic source, its operation, and the optimization experiments that we performed to obtain best performance. The versatility of the source is demonstrated by the production of guided beams of different molecular species.