Continuous, dense, highly collimated sodium beam

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 1×1010 cm−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.

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