Magnetic control of supersonic beams : magnetic slowing to isotope separation

Ashok Khosla

Azer Trimeche, Manabendra Nath Bera, JeanPaul Cromiéres +2 more

Yu Wei Lu, Lukas Gerhard Georg Gradl, Li-Chung Ha +5 more

Isaac Chavez, Edvardas Narevicius, A. Libson +4 more

Edvardas Narevicius, Christian G. Parthey, A. Libson +4 more

We report the experimental demonstration of a novel method to slow atoms and molecules with permanent magnetic moments using pulsed magnetic fields. In our experiments, we observe the slowing of a supersonic beam of metastable neon from 461.0 ± 7.7 to 403 ± 16 m s−1 in 18 stages, where the slowed peak is clearly separated from the initial distribution. This method has broad applications as it may easily be generalized, using seeding and entrainment into supersonic beams, to all paramagnetic atoms and molecules.

M. Jerkins, Isaac Chavez, Uzi Even +1 more

We propose a general and scalable approach to isotope separation. The method is based on an irreversible change of the mass-to-magnetic moment ratio of a particular isotope in an atomic beam, followed by a magnetic multipole whose gradients deflect and guide the atoms. The underlying mechanism is a reduction of the entropy of the beam by the information of a single scattered photon for each atom that is separated. We numerically simulate isotope separation for a range of examples, which demonstrate this technique's general applicability to almost the entire periodic table. The practical importance of the proposed method is that large-scale isotope separation should be possible, using ordinary inexpensive magnets and the existing technologies of supersonic beams and lasers.