Experimental Study on Electrostatic Guiding of Supersonic D₂O Molecular Beam with Two Charged Wires

We demonstrate the guiding of a supersonic heavy-water (D₂O) molecular beam using a hollow electrostatic field generated by the combination of two parallel charged-wires and two grounded metal-plates, and report some new and preliminary experimental results. In the experiment, we detect the guiding signals by using the method of time-of-flight mass spectrum and study the dependence of the relative transmission of the beam guide on the guiding voltage. Our study shows that the relative transmission of the beam guide is increased linearly with increasing guiding voltage V_guid, and the number of the guided D₂O molecules is at least increased by 89.4% when the guiding voltage is +20.0kV. Finally, some potential applications of our guiding scheme in the molecule optics are briefly discussed.