Electrostatic guiding of cold polar molecules on a chip

Abstract

We propose a novel scheme to guide cold polar molecules on the surface of an insulating substrate (i.e. a chip) using an electrostatic field generated by the combination of a pair of parallel charged wires and a grounded metal plate. The spatial distributions of the electric fields from the above charged-wire layout and their Stark potentials for cold CO molecules and dipole forces are calculated, and the relationships between the electric field and the geometric parameters of our charged-wire system are analyzed. Our study shows that our charged-wire scheme can be used to guide cold polar molecules in the weak-field-seeking state, and to construct various molecular optical elements, such as a molecular funnel, a molecular beam splitter and a molecular interferometer and so on, to form various integrated molecular optical elements and their molecular chips, and even to generate a continuous wave (CW) cold molecular beam by using a low-pass energy filter based on bent two-wire guiding.