Getting a Grip on the Transverse Motion in a Zeeman Decelerator

Katrin Dulitz; Michael Motsch; Nicolas Vanhaecke; Timothy P. Softley

doi:10.1063/1.4866906

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arXiv · 1402.4155

Getting a Grip on the Transverse Motion in a Zeeman Decelerator

Katrin Dulitz·Michael Motsch·Nicolas Vanhaecke·Timothy P. Softley

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Abstract

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.

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Katrin Dulitz, Michael Motsch, Nicolas Vanhaecke, Timothy P. Softley. 2014-02-17. Getting a Grip on the Transverse Motion in a Zeeman Decelerator. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4866906

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