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Obtaining colder ensembles of free clusters by using evaporation and recoil

  • Clusters and Nanostructures
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Abstract.

We describe a theoretical model which treats the effects of evaporation-induced recoil on the mass and temperature distributions of a collimated beam of small neutral clusters emitted by a hot-nozzle source. The model incorporates two important consequences of in-flight cluster fragmentation processes. One is the well-known statistical evaporation of atoms and dimers accompanied by cluster size redistribution and cooling, and the other is the accompanying mechanical recoil of the fragments. We predict that the filtering effect introduced by cluster recoil can be used to an advantage by separating out the off-axis cluster population. This fraction will have a significantly narrower and colder distribution of internal temperatures than the on-axis ensemble.

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Hansen, K., Wong, K. & Kresin, V. Obtaining colder ensembles of free clusters by using evaporation and recoil. Eur. Phys. J. D 32, 339–345 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2004-00188-9

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