Research Papers in Physics and Astronomy
Date of this Version
March 2003
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.
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/