Optics Letters
Beam splitter for guided polar molecules with a Y-shaped charged wire
Lianzhong Deng, Jianping Yin
Abstract
We propose a beam splitter for cold polar molecules in weak-field-seeking states that uses a Y-shaped charged wire half embedded in a substrate and sandwiched by a charged metallic parallel-plate capacitor. We demonstrate our molecular-beam splitter and study its dynamic beam-splitting process for the guided cold molecules by using Monte Carlo simulation. Our study shows that cold polar molecules from a supersonic beam source with a mean velocity of a few hundred meters per second can be split with a fixed 0.5/0.5 splitting ratio, and an adjustable splitting ratio of about 0.03-0.97 can be realized by introducing a small alteration to the scheme.