Multistage Zeeman deceleration of atomic and molecular oxygen

TL;DR

This paper presents a robust, modular multistage Zeeman decelerator with 100 solenoids and hexapoles, capable of significantly reducing the velocity of atomic and molecular oxygen for advanced scattering experiments.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new, scalable Zeeman decelerator design optimized for producing slow molecular beams with high thermal and vacuum stability.

Findings

Atomic oxygen velocity tunable from 500 to 125 m/s

Molecular oxygen velocity tunable from 350 to 150 m/s

Achieved up to 95% kinetic energy reduction for atomic oxygen

Abstract

Multistage Zeeman deceleration is a technique used to reduce the velocity of neutral molecules with a magnetic dipole moment. Here we present a Zeeman decelerator that consists of 100 solenoids and 100 magnetic hexapoles, that is based on a short prototype design presented recently [Phys. Rev. A 95, 043415 (2017)]. The decelerator features a modular design with excellent thermal and vacuum properties, and is robustly operated at a 10 Hz repetition rate. This multistage Zeeman decelerator is particularly optimized to produce molecular beams for applications in crossed beam molecular scattering experiments. We characterize the decelerator using beams of atomic and molecular oxygen. For atomic oxygen, the magnetic fields produced by the solenoids are used to tune the final longitudinal velocity in the 500 - 125 m/s range, while for molecular oxygen the velocity is tunable in the 350 - 150 m/s range. This corresponds to a maximum kinetic energy reduction of 95% and 80% for atomic and molecular oxygen, respectively.