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Physical Review Letters

Optical Stark Decelerator for Molecules

R. C. Fulton, Alexis I. Bishop, P. F. Barker

Published Dec 9, 2004• 192 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate a single stage optical Stark decelerator for neutral molecules which is capable of reducing the translational energy of benzene molecules within a molecular beam by 15% in a single pulsed Gaussian optical field of 15 ns duration. The change in velocity induced by the optical potential is measured by the change in the time of flight of benzene molecules ionized by a second optical field after the slowing field is turned off. A maximum reduction in the velocity of 25 m/s was measured using a single Gaussian beam with a peak intensity of 1.6 x 10(12) W/cm(2) corresponding to a maximum well depth of 253 K.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.93.243004

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We demonstrate a single stage optical Stark decelerator for neutral molecules which reduced the velocity of benzene molecules in a molecular beam by 25 m/s corresponding to a kinetic energy reduction of 15 %.

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Optics Express•Mar 21, 2012•1 citation
We demonstrate a single stage optical Stark decelerator for neutral molecules which is capable of reducing the translational energy of benzene molecules within a molecular beam by 15% in a single pulsed Gaussian optical field of 15 ns duration. The change in velocity induced by the optical potential is measured by the change in the time of flight of benzene molecules ionized by a second optical field after the slowing field is turned off. A maximum reduction in the velocity of 25 m/s was measured using a single Gaussian beam with a peak intensity of 1.6 x 10(12) W/cm(2) corresponding to a maximum well depth of 253 K.
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We propose a novel scheme to decelerate a cw precooled molecular beam by using an optical Stark decelerator, which is composed of a red-detuned cw semi-Gaussian beam. The dynamical process of the optical Stark deceleration for a cw methane molecular beam is studied by Monte Carlo simulations. It is realized that the proposed optical Stark decelerator can be used to continuously slow a cw methane molecular beam with a longitudinal temperature of 30 mK, and a maximum reduction in the most probable speed of 0.388 m/s (corresponding to a relative change of 9.93%) can be obtained by using a single semi-Gaussian beam with a power of 500 W and a maximum central intensity of about 7.96 × 10 7 W/cm 2 .
The deceleration of molecules from cold molecular beams using electric and magnetic fields has become an important means for producing stationary, cold dipolar or paramagnetic molecular gases that can be trapped and potentially cooled to ultra-cold temperatures in the μK range. We report on a general scheme for the creation of cold molecules of essentially any type by deceleration of a cold molecular beam using intense optical fields. Deceleration of benzene molecules to zero velocity is achieved by utilizing a single half oscillation of the center-of-mass motion of the molecules within a moving optical lattice. The lattice traveling at half the speed of the molecular beam is created by the interference of two near-counter-propagating fields at different frequencies. We show that by rapidly switching on the optical lattice for approximately the time required for a half oscillation, a bunch of approximately 10 5 benzene molecules can be rapidly decelerated and brought to rest in the laboratory frame.
According to the optical Stark deceleration theory of using a stationary quasi-cw red-detuned optical lattice to slow and trap an arbitrary pulsed molecular beam, we propose a novel idea of using a modulated optical lattice instead of a stationary one to realize a multistage optical Stark deceleration. We analyze the motion of the decelerated molecules inside the optical decelerator, and study the dependence of the velocity of the decelerated molecular packet on the synchronous phase angle and the number of the deceleration stages (i.e. half the number of the optical-lattice cells) by using the Monte-Carlo method. The simulation results show that it takes longer time for the molecules to reach the detector as the number of the deceleration stages increases. The decelerated molecular wave packets are gradually separated from the large wave packets of the original molecular velocity distribution. And the higher the number of the deceleration stages, the lower the decelerated molecular speed is. In addition, we also study the influence of the initial phase angle of synchronous molecules under the same conditions. It is demonstrated that the higher the initial phase angle of synchronous molecules, the lower the decelerated molecular speed is and the smaller the number of molecules in the deceleration wave packet, so the phase space is compressed. The result also shows that the modulated optical Stark decelerator does not have the process of molecular free flight, and thus improving the efficiency of deceleration for molecules. The ultra-cold molecules can be trapped in the optical lattice by rapidly turning off the modulation signal of the lattice. Comparing with the previous scheme, the doubled number of the deceleration stages is reached in the same optical lattice length since a modulated optical lattice is used. For a length of optical lattice of 3.71 mm, theoretical simulation results demonstrate that the speed of methane molecules is decelerated from 280 m/s to 172 m/s. Comparing with the previous results from 280 m/s to 232 m/s, the deceleration effect is improved by 26%. Our scheme can not only obtain an ultra-colder molecular packet under the same molecular-beam parameters and deceleration conditions, but also be directly used to trap the slowed cold molecules after the deceleration without needing to use other techniques for molecular trapping.
We propose a promising scheme to realize the deceleration of a pulsed subsonic molecular beam by using a multistage optical Stark decelerator (i.e., a 1D quasi-cw traveling optical lattice), which is composed of two nearly counter-propagating, time-varying, red-detuned light fields with an intensity of ~10⁷Wcm⁻² and a fixed frequency difference between them. We also study the influence of the velocity reduced amount of the traveling lattice, the lattice power, the synchronous phase angle, the deceleration-stage number and the temporal profile of laser pulses on the molecular slowing results by using 3D Monte-Carlo method. Our study shows that the proposed decelerator cannot only be used to slow a pulsed subsonic beam from 240m/s to standstill, but also to obtain a cold molecular packet with a temperature of a few µK, and the corresponding fraction of cold molecules is 10⁻⁶-10⁻⁷, which strongly depends on the synchronous phase angle. And we also find that a pair of appropriate rising and falling times of laser pulses will lead to a better slowing effect than that produced by the top-hat temporal ones.