Improved setup for producing slow beams of cold molecules using a rotating nozzle

TL;DR

This paper presents an improved rotating nozzle setup that produces cold, slow molecular beams with enhanced control over velocity, enabling better manipulation and guiding of polar molecules for experimental applications.

Contribution

An improved rotating nozzle design that accelerates or decelerates cold molecular beams by up to 500 m/s and integrates with electrostatic guiding techniques.

Findings

Beams of cold molecules can be controlled with velocity adjustments up to 500 m/s.

The setup allows for detailed characterization of beam parameters via time of flight analysis.

Integration with electrostatic fields enables guiding of polar molecules.

Abstract

Intense beams of cold and slow molecules are produced by supersonic expansion out of a rapidly rotating nozzle, as first demonstrated by Gupta and Herschbach. An improved setup is presented that allows to accelerate or decelerate cold atomic and molecular beams by up to 500 m/s. Technical improvements are discussed and beam parameters are characterized by detailed analysis of time of flight density distributions. The possibility of combining this beam source with electrostatic fields for guiding polar molecules is demonstrated.