A superconducting Fabry-Perot cavity for trapping cold molecules

A superconducting Fabry-Perot microwave cavity for a molecular trap was designed, constructed and characterized. The cavity was designed to create intense microwave fields that are sufficient to trap cold polar molecules by the AC Stark force. By coating the mirror surfaces with a superconducting material, an unloaded quality factor of up to 1.1 × 106 at 24.087 GHz was achieved at a temperature of 2.24 K. The field strength of 1.06 MV m-1 obtained for a TEM02 transverse mode with an input power of 10 W is sufficiently intense to trap ammonia molecules at a temperature of 85 mK, which is achievable by a conventional Stark molecular decelerator. We have also implemented an ion optics assembly for sensitive detection of molecules inside the microwave cavity by resonance enhanced multi-photon ionization.