Deceleration of a Supersonic Beam of SrF Molecules

The work depicted in this thesis demonstrate the successful operation of a 4 meter long traveling-wave Stark decelerator. This is a novel tool for deceleration of heavy diatomic molecules to arbitrarily slow beams with a very small velocity spread which can serve as ideal starting point for precision tests of fundamental physics.
The first part of the thesis discusses the characterization of a new Supersonic beam source for creation of SrF molecules which serves as an ideal candidate for precision test of nuclear spin dependent parity violation. The later part of the thesis discusses the the results of deceleration of a SrF molecules in the N = 1 rotation state of the SrF(v = 0) electronic ground state from a supersonic beam with an initial velocity of 340 m/s to 265 m/s using a deceleration potential with 3.25 k V voltage amplitude using a the 4 m long traveling-wave decelerator built in our research lab.
Increasing the voltage amplitude of the potential to 4.8 kV, we were able to decelerate molecules from 340 m/s to 250 m/s which corresponds to a deceleration strength of 6.6 km /s2. By cooling the valve by flushing cold nitrogen gas through the valve enclosure we were able to decrease the initial velocity of the supersonic beam. With the valve cooled to ~190 K, we demonstrated deceleration of SrF molecules from 290 m/s to 120 m/s which corresponds to the removal of almost 85% of the initial kinetic energy.
The thesis described the operation of the decelerator and end with an outlook for precision tests using this novel tool.