Electromagnetic trap for polar particles

Abstract

A novel design for an electromagnetic trap is proposed for confinement of neutral particles having a permanent electric dipole moment. The device uses a combination of a sextupole electric and quadrupole magnetic fields superimposed with a strong constant electric field perfectly aligned along the z-axis. We use the extended dipole model to study the dynamics of particle in this position dependent electromagnetic field. The motion of the centre of mass of the dipole is nonlinearly coupled with its rotation. We find three families of particular solutions for which the orbits are periodic or quasiperiodic. They correspond to the particular cases when the whole energy is accumulated in either translational or rotational degrees of freedom. Stability analysis of chosen particular solutions provides trapping conditions. We present several numerical simulations which illustrate trapping and confinement of an electric dipole in the proposed trap. These simulations were performed for three kinds of polar particles and various fields selections. We hope that the proposed model allows experimental physicists to apply a wide variety of non-destructive methods for manipulation, detection and analysis of trapped particles.