Collisional and radiative processes in adiabatic deceleration, deflection, and off-axis trapping of a Rydberg atom beam.

A supersonic beam of Rydberg hydrogen atoms has been adiabatically deflected by 90°, decelerated to zero velocity in less than 25  μs, and loaded into an electric trap. The deflection has allowed the suppression of collisions with atoms in the trailing part of the gas pulse. The processes leading to trap losses, i.e., fluorescence to the ground state, and transitions and ionization induced by blackbody radiation have been monitored over several milliseconds and quantitatively analyzed.