Decelerating a pulsed subsonic molecular beam by a quasi-cw optical lattice: 3D Monte-Carlo simulations

作者：Ji, Xiang; Yin, Yaling; Zhou, Qi; Wang, Zhenxia; Yin, Jianping^*

来源：Optics Communications, 2013, 287: 128-136.

DOI：10.1016/j.optcom.2012.06.092

• Atomic and molecular physics
• Laser cooling
• Laser trapping
• Stark effect
• Cavity enhancement

We propose a practical scheme to realize the deceleration of a pulsed subsonic molecular beam by using a multistage optical Stark decelerator (i.e., a 1D quasi-cw, cavity-enhanced optical lattice), which is composed of two nearly counter-propagating, time-varying, red-detuned, light fields with an intensity of similar to 10(8) W cm(-2) in a folded ring resonator. The dependences of the molecular slowing effects on the synchronous phase angle, the deceleration-stage number and the initial central velocity of incident molecular beam as well as the cavity enhancement factor and its cavity length are investigated by the 3D Monte-Carlo method. Our study shows that the proposed decelerator cannot only be used to slow a pulsed subsonic beam from 240 m/s to standstill, but also to obtain a ultracold molecular packet with a temperature of a few mu K due to the bunching effect of our multistage optical Stark decelerator, and the corresponding fraction of cold molecules is 10(-4)-10(-6), which strongly depends on the synchronous phase angle, the cavity enhancement factor and the initial central velocity of incident Molecular beam, etc..

• 出版日期2013-1-15
• 单位华东师范大学