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Phys. Rev. A 66, 043401 (2002) [8 pages]

Buffer-gas cooling of atomic and molecular beams

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Dima Egorov1, Thierry Lahaye1 *, Wieland Schöllkopf1, Bretislav Friedrich1,2, and John M. Doyle1
1Department of Physics and Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
2Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Received 19 April 2002; published 4 October 2002

We demonstrate direct loading and cooling of a thermal beam into a cryogenic helium buffer gas. Our test species is rubidium; we observe a thermal beam with 3×1013 s-1 flux entering a cryocell and thermalizing with a 4.2-K buffer gas. There is no evidence of clustering or other spurious loss mechanisms. The cooling technique should be applicable to a wide variety of species, including radicals.


©2002 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.66.043401
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.66.043401
PACS: 33.80.Ps, 32.80.Pj, 39.10.+j

* Permanent address: Départment de Physique, École Normale Supérieure, 24 Rue Lhomond, 75230 Paris, France.

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