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Methods for Cold Molecules and Ions: Tutorial Reviews

This thematic series features selectively invited, tutorial-style review articles from key scientists in the field detailing the "nuts and bolts" of cold molecules, ions and collision experiments, meant both to educate beginning PhD students and to support new groups entering the field. After the remarkable progress of recent experiments on the production and manipulation of cold molecules and ions, these techniques are now finding applications in many subfields of physics and chemistry. A comprehensive collection of methodological tutorials on this topic is therefore timely and constitutes added value for students and researchers. This collection will continue to be maintained in the future to form an open-access knowledge base for the entire cold molecules community.
Edited by: Hendrick Bethlem, Robert Continetti and Stefan Willitsch


  1. The Stark deceleration technique can produce molecular beams with very low velocities. In order to maximize the density of decelerated molecules, experimental parameters such as the velocity, the velocity spre...

    Authors: Dominik Haas, Sebastian Scherb, Dongdong Zhang and Stefan Willitsch
    Citation: EPJ Techniques and Instrumentation 2017 4:6
  2. Sympathetic cooling of molecular ions with ultracold gases is enabling a new era of research in chemistry and physics. There has been much progress in this new field in the last several years and many unantici...

    Authors: Eric R. Hudson
    Citation: EPJ Techniques and Instrumentation 2016 3:8
  3. We present and discuss in detail the design and characterization of a new linear quadrupole ion trap with additional ion ejection and acceleration electrodes that is coupled to a time-of-flight mass spectromet...

    Authors: Daniel Rösch, Hong Gao, Ardita Kilaj and Stefan Willitsch
    Citation: EPJ Techniques and Instrumentation 2016 3:5
  4. 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 e...

    Authors: Stephen D. Hogan
    Citation: EPJ Techniques and Instrumentation 2016 3:2
  5. In the last years, it was demonstrated that neutral molecules can be loaded on a microchip directly from a supersonic beam. The molecules are confined in microscopic traps that can be moved smoothly over the s...

    Authors: Gabriele Santambrogio
    Citation: EPJ Techniques and Instrumentation 2015 2:14
  6. A Stark decelerator produces beams of molecules with high quantum state purity, and small spatial, temporal and velocity spreads. These tamed molecular beams are ideally suited for high-resolution crossed beam...

    Authors: Alexander von Zastrow, Jolijn Onvlee, David H. Parker and Sebastiaan Y.T. van de Meerakker
    Citation: EPJ Techniques and Instrumentation 2015 2:11

    The Erratum to this article has been published in EPJ Techniques and Instrumentation 2015 2:16

  7. A detailed description of a merged beam apparatus for the study of low energy molecular scattering is given. This review is intended to guide any scientist who plans to construct a similar experiment, and to p...

    Authors: Andreas Osterwalder
    Citation: EPJ Techniques and Instrumentation 2015 2:10