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Chinese Physics B

Cooling and trapping polar molecules in an electrostatic trap

Zhenxia Wang, Zhenxing Gu, Lianzhong Deng, Jianping Yin

Published Apr 30, 2015• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An electrostatic trap for polar molecules is proposed. Loading and trapping of polar molecules can be realized by applying different voltages to the two electrodes of the trap. For ND 3 molecular beams centered at ∼10 m/s, a high loading efficiency of ∼67% can be obtained, as confirmed by our Monte Carlo simulations. The volume of our trap is as large as ∼3.6 cm 3 , suitable for study of the adiabatic cooling of trapped molecules. Our simulations indicate that trapped ND 3 molecules can be cooled from ∼23.3 mK to 1.47 mK by reducing the trapping voltages on the electrodes from 50.0 kV to 1.00 kV.

DOI
10.1088/1674-1056/24/5/053701

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International Journal of Modern Physics B•Feb 1, 2023•1 citation
An electrostatic trap for polar molecules is proposed. Loading and trapping of polar molecules can be realized by applying different voltages to the two electrodes of the trap. For ND 3 molecular beams centered at ∼10 m/s, a high loading efficiency of ∼67% can be obtained, as confirmed by our Monte Carlo simulations. The volume of our trap is as large as ∼3.6 cm 3 , suitable for study of the adiabatic cooling of trapped molecules. Our simulations indicate that trapped ND 3 molecules can be cooled from ∼23.3 mK to 1.47 mK by reducing the trapping voltages on the electrodes from 50.0 kV to 1.00 kV.
We propose a controllable high-efficiency electrostatic surface trap for cold polar molecules on a chip by using two insulator-embedded charged rings and a grounded conductor plate. We calculate Stark energy structure pattern of ND3 molecules in an external electric field using the method of matrix diagonalization. We analyze how the voltages that are applied to the ring electrodes affect the depth of the efficient well and the controllability of the distance between the trap center and the surface of the chip. To obtain a better understanding, we simulate the dynamical loading and trapping processes of ND 3 molecules in a | J , KM 〉 = |1, − 1〉 state by using classical Monte—Carlo method. Our study shows that the loading efficiency of our trap can reach ∼ 88%. Finally, we study the adiabatic cooling of cold molecules in our surface trap by linearly lowering the potential-well depth (i.e., lowering the trapping voltage), and find that the temperature of the trapped ND3 molecules can be adiabatically cooled from 34.5 mK to ∼ 5.8 mK when the trapping voltage is reduced from −35 kV to −3 kV.
We propose a versatile electrostatic trap scheme using several charged spherical electrodes and a bias electric field. We first give the two-ball scheme and derive the analytical solution of the electric field. In order to make a comparison, we also give the numerical solution calculated by the finite element software (Ansoft Maxwell). Considering the loading of cold polar molecules into the trap, we give the three-ball scheme. We first give the analytical and numerical solutions of the distribution of the electric field. Then we simulate the dynamic process of the loading and trapping cold molecules using the classical Monte Carlo method. We analyze the influence of the velocity of the incident molecular beam and the loading time on the loading efficiency. After that, we give the temperature of the trapped cold molecules. Our study shows that the loading efficiency can reach 82%, and the corresponding temperature of the trapped molecules is about 24.6 mK. At last, we show that the single well divides into two ones by increasing the bias electric field or decreasing the voltages applied to the spherical electrodes.
We propose a novel optical-access opened electrostatic trap to study the Stark-potential evaporative cooling of polar molecules by using two charged disk electrodes with a central hole of radius r 0 =1.5 mm, and derive a set of new analytical equations to calculate the spatial distributions of the electrostatic field in the above charged-disk layout. Afterwards, we calculate the electric-field distributions of our electrostatic trap and the Stark potential for cold ND 3 molecules, and analyze the dependences of both the electric field and the Stark potential on the geometric parameters of our charged-disk scheme, and find an optimal condition to form a desirable trap with the same trap depth in the x , y , and z directions. Also, we propose a desirable scheme to realize an efficient loading of cold polar molecules in the weak-field-seeking states, and investigate the dependences of the loading efficiency on both the initial forward velocity of the incident molecular beam and the loading time by Monte Carlo simulations. Our study shows that the maximal loading efficiency of our trap scheme can reach about 95%, and the corresponding temperature of the trapped cold molecules is about 28.8 mK. Finally, we study the Stark-potential evaporative cooling for cold polar molecules in our trap by the Monte Carlo method, and find that our simulated evaporative cooling results are consistent with our developed analytical model based on trapping-potential evaporative cooling.
We propose an optically accessible electrostatic trap scheme to confine cold polar molecules by using two charged spherical electrodes, and we calculate the corresponding electric field distribution and the Stark trapping potential for ND3 molecules. We also propose a desirable scheme to realize an efficient loading of cold polar molecules in weak-field-seeking states, and our simulated results show that the maximal loading efficiency can reach ∼14%. In addition, we briefly discuss some potential applications of our proposed trap scheme in the studies of optical-potential evaporative cooling and electrostatic surface traps for cold polar molecules.
A versatile electrostatic trap with open optical access for cold polar molecules in weak-field-seeking state is proposed in this paper. The trap is composed of a pair of disk electrodes and a hexapole. With the help of a finite element software, the spatial distribution of the electrostatic field is calculated. The results indicate that a three-dimensional closed electrostatic trap is formed. Taking ND 3 molecules as an example, the dynamic process of loading and trapping is simulated. The results show that when the velocity of the molecular beam is 10 m/s and the loading time is 0.9964 ms, the maximum loading efficiency reaches 94.25% and the temperature of the trapped molecules reaches about 30.3 mK. A single well can be split into two wells, which is of significant importance to the precision measurement and interference of matter waves. This scheme, in addition, can be further miniaturized to construct one-dimensional, two-dimensional, and three-dimensional spatial electrostatic lattices.
An electrostatic lattice is composed of many micro-scale traps. It is a powerful tool for manipulating cold polar molecules on a chip with the help of the interaction between the dipole moment and the inhomogeneous electric field. To the best of our knowledge, the existing electrostatic lattice still suffers the nonadiabatic transition that will lead to the escape of molecules from the electrostatic trap. In the paper, we skillfully design the electrode structure to avoid the zero-field zone at the center of every single microtrap, and the nonadiabatic transitions can be prevented. First, we numerically calculate the distribution of the spatial electrostatic field. Then, the influences of voltages on the electric field intensity and the height of the trap center are investigated. We simulate of the trajectory of molecules using the Monte Carlo method and figure out the factors impacting the loading efficiency of our electrostatic lattice. At last, we discuss how the voltages and the loading positions affect the positional distribution of trapped molecules.