Magnetic trapping of atomic nitrogen and cotrapping of imidogen.

摘要

We observe magnetic trapping of atomic nitrogen (14N) and cotrapping of ground-state imidogen (14NH, X3sum -) and measure collisional properties of both species. Both are loaded directly from a room-temperature beam via buffer gas cooling. We trap approximately 1 x 1012 14N atoms at a peak density of 2 x 1012 cm-3 at 600 mK. We also separately trap similar numbers of the isotope 15N. For magnetically trapped 14N, observation times of over 100 s have been achieved. Utilizing a new pulsed cryogenic reservoir for introducing buffer gas into the cell, we are able to cotrap 14N and 14NH and subsequently rapidly remove most of the buffer gas. This allows for observation times of trapped NH of up to 10 s. This is sufficiently long to study N-NH collisions in the magnetic trap. From our observations, we estimate a ratio of elastic to inelastic N-NH collisions of gamma ≈ 100 at a temperature of 570 mK.