Getting a Grip on the Transverse Motion in a Zeeman Decelerator

Journal article

Zeeman deceleration is an experimental technique in which inhomogeneous, time-dependent magnetic fields generated inside an array of solenoid coils are used to manipulate the velocity of a supersonic beam. A 12-stage Zeeman decelerator has been built and characterized using hydrogen atoms as a test system. The instrument has several original features including the possibility to replace each deceleration coil individually. In this article, we give a detailed description of the experimental setup, and illustrate its performance. We demonstrate that the overall acceptance in a Zeeman decelerator can be significantly increased with only minor changes to the setup itself. This is achieved by applying a rather low, anti-parallel magnetic field in one of the solenoid coils that forms a temporally varying quadrupole field, and improves particle confinement in the transverse direction. The results are reproduced by three-dimensional numerical particle trajectory simulations thus allowing for a rigorous analysis of the experimental data. The findings suggest the use of a modified coil configuration to improve transverse focusing during the deceleration process.

Authors: Dulitz, K; Motsch, M; Vanhaecke, N; Softley, T

• Publication status: Published
• Publisher: American Institute of Physics Inc.
• Journal: JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL PHYSICS
• Volume: 140
• Issue: 10
• Pages: 104201-104201
• Publication date: 2014-02-17
• DOI: 10.1063/1.4866906
• EISSN: 1089-7690
• ISSN: 0021-9606
• Language: English
• Keywords: physics.chem-ph; physics.atom-ph