Static trapping of polar molecules in a traveling wave decelerator

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a novel traveling wave decelerator for polar molecules that achieves efficient trapping and deceleration with minimal losses, enabling advanced control and cooling of molecules like NH3 and ND3.

Contribution

It introduces a new traveling wave decelerator design that improves molecule trapping efficiency and control compared to traditional Stark deceleration methods.

Findings

Decelerated and trapped ammonia molecules with high efficiency.

Achieved adiabatic cooling and resonant excitation of trapped molecules.

Demonstrated precise control over molecular motion using high-voltage waveforms.

Abstract

We present experiments on decelerating and trapping ammonia molecules using a combination of a Stark decelerator and a traveling wave decelerator. In the traveling wave decelerator a moving potential is created by a series of ring-shaped electrodes to which oscillating high voltages are applied. By lowering the frequency of the applied voltages, the molecules confined in the moving trap are decelerated and brought to a standstill. As the molecules are confined in a true 3D well, this new kind of deceleration has practically no losses, resulting in a great improvement on the usual Stark deceleration techniques. The necessary voltages are generated by amplifying the output of an arbitrary wave generator using fast HV-amplifiers, giving us great control over the trapped molecules. We illustrate this by experiments in which we adiabatically cool trapped NH3 and ND3 molecules and resonantly excite their motion.