Continuous, dense, highly collimated sodium beam

Abstract

We have developed a slow, highly collimated, and bright sodium atom beam suitable for orientation and alignment studies in cold collisions. A combination of transverse-optical collimation, longitudinal cooling, rapid decoupling from the longitudinal cooling cycle, and a final "optical-force extrusion" stage produces an atom density of 1×1010cm-3 within a beam-divergence solid angle of 2×10-6 sr. Rapid Zeeman-cooler decoupling results in a narrow laboratory velocity distribution of 5 m/s full width at half maximum and a cold binary intrabeam collision temperature of 4 mK. © 2000 American Institute of Physics.