Schedule Mar 15, 2013
A Moving Trap Zeeman Decelerator for Quantum Simulation
David Carty (Durham Univ.)

In a remarkable paper from 2006, Peter Zoller (Micheli et al., Nat. Phys, 2, 341) showed that polar radicals arranged in optical lattices can be used to systematically engineer many-body Hamiltonians of spin lattice models that can used to understand the properties of exotic materials. I will present the current status of an experimental effort in Durham to construct a moving trap Zeeman decelerator, which is designed (based on that of Trimeche et al., Eur. Phys. J., 65, 263 (2011)) to produce trapped cold polar radicals that can be further cooled to microKelvin temperatures by sympathetic cooling with laser cooled atoms in a microwave trap. The design  uses current-carrying coils wound to produce an array of overlapping magnetic traps that can be decelerated very smoothly from the initial velocity of a molecular beam to rest. I will present the results of Monte Carlo simulations that show that the decelerator should be highly efficient.


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