Water vapor at a translational temperature of one kelvin

Abstract

We report the creation of a confined slow beam of heavy-water (D2O) molecules with a translational temperature around 1 kelvin. This is achieved by filtering slow D2O from a thermal ensemble with inhomogeneous static electric fields exploiting the quadratic Stark shift of D2O. All previous demonstrations of electric field manipulation of cold dipolar molecules rely on a predominantly linear Stark shift. Further, on the basis of elementary molecular properties and our filtering technique we argue that our D2O beam contains molecules in only a few ro-vibrational states.