Intense Atomic and Molecular Beams via Neon Buffer Gas Cooling

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a novel buffer gas source using cold neon to produce intense, continuous beams of cold atoms and molecules, with potential applications in laser cooling, trapping, and collision studies.

Contribution

The authors introduce a new neon-based buffer gas source that generates intense, continuous cold atomic and molecular beams with properties suitable for advanced quantum experiments.

Findings

Achieved a flux of 3e11 ND3 molecules/s and 1e16 K atoms/s.

Produced beams with velocities comparable to helium-based sources.

Source is adaptable to various species with vapor pressure below 1000 K.

Abstract

We realize a continuous guided beam of cold deuterated ammonia with a flux of 3e11 ND3 molecules/s and a continuous free-space beam of cold potassium with a flux of 1e16 K atoms/s. A novel feature of the buffer gas source used to produce these beams is cold neon, which, due to intermediate Knudsen number beam dynamics, produces a forward velocity and low-energy tail that is comparable to much colder helium-based sources. We expect this source to be trivially generalizable to a very wide range of atomic and molecular species with significant vapor pressure below 1000 K. This source has properties that make it a good starting point for laser cooling of molecules or atoms, cold collision studies, trapping, or nonlinear optics in buffer-gas-cooled atomic or molecular gases.