Correspondence: [email protected] Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT London, UK Abstract The large electric dipole moments associated with highly excited Rydberg states of atoms and molecules make gas-phase samples in these states very well suited to deceleration and trapping using inhomogeneous electric fields. The methods of Rydberg-Stark de...

We derive the propagator for a massless, minimally coupled scalar on a D-dimensional, spatially flat, homogeneous and isotropic background with arbitrary constant deceleration parameter. Our construction uses the operator formalism, by integrating the Fourier mode sum. We give special attention to infrared corrections from the nonzero lower limit associated with working on finite spatial sectio...

We demonstrate feedback control optimization for the Stark deceleration and trapping of neutral polar molecules using evolutionary strategies. In a Stark-decelerator beamline, pulsed electric fields are used to decelerate OH radicals and subsequently store them in an electrostatic trap. The efficiency of the deceleration and trapping process is determined by the exact timings of the applied ele...

Our experiments and molecular dynamics simulations on a projectile penetrating a two-dimensional granular medium reveal that the mean deceleration of the projectile is constant and proportional to the impact velocity. Thus, the time taken for a projectile to decelerate to a stop is independent of its impact velocity. The simulations show that the probability distribution function of forces on g...