Consideration of possible mass and velocity corrections to magnetic cluster experiments

Authors

• Z.Y. Liu, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• Peter A. Dowben, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
• A.P. Popov, Engineering Physics Institute, Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia
• David P. Pappas, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Magnetic Recording Measurements, Boulder, ColoradoFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

March 2003

Comments

Published Phys. Rev. A 67 (2003) art. no. 033202. Permission to use. Published by American Physical Society, Copyright 2003. Used by permission. http://prb.aps.org/

Abstract

Gadolinium occurs, in natural abundance, as several isotopes. The possible combinations of different gadolinium isotopes dictates that even for a fixed number of atoms in the cluster, clusters of gadolinium atoms will exhibit a range of masses. This and the expected consequence of the translation energy distributions are explored as possible corrections to Stern-Gerlach cluster beam-deflection experiments. Upon closer inspection of the experimental data, we find that the translation energy plus the vibrational temperature distribution may be inhomogeneous. This could be the origin of a long tail to high deflections in the experimental deflection profiles, at low cluster temperatures, in the magnetic cluster Stern-Gerlach experiments.