Multistage Zeeman deceleration of metastable neon

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the deceleration of metastable neon atoms using a multistage Zeeman decelerator, achieving significant kinetic energy reduction and enabling isotope separation with detailed characterization of the cold atomic beam.

Contribution

The study introduces a multistage Zeeman decelerator with 91 solenoids for effective kinetic energy removal and isotope separation of neon atoms, with comprehensive phase-space analysis.

Findings

Atoms decelerated from 580m/s to 105m/s, removing over 95% of initial kinetic energy.

Achieved atomic temperatures as low as 10mK in the moving frame.

Demonstrated isotope separation between $^{20}$Ne and $^{22}$Ne.

Abstract

A supersonic beam of metastable neon atoms has been decelerated by exploiting the interaction between the magnetic moment of the atoms and time-dependent inhomogeneous magnetic fields in a multistage Zeeman decelerator. Using 91 deceleration solenoids, the atoms were decelerated from an initial velocity of 580m/s to final velocities as low as 105m/s, corresponding to a removal of more than 95% of their initial kinetic energy. The phase-space distribution of the cold, decelerated atoms was characterized by time-of-flight and imaging measurements, from which a temperature of 10mK was obtained in the moving frame of the decelerated sample. In combination with particle-trajectory simulations, these measurements allowed the phase-space acceptance of the decelerator to be quantified. The degree of isotope separation that can be achieved by multistage Zeeman deceleration was also studied by performing experiments with pulse sequences generated for $^{20}$Ne and $^{22}$Ne.