A Longitudinal Zeeman Slower Based on Ring-Shaped Permanent Magnets for a Strontium Optical Lattice Clock

We report a longitudinal Zeeman slower based on ring-shaped permanent magnetic dipoles used for the strontium optical lattice clock. The Zeeman slower is composed of 40 permanent magnets with the same outer diameter but different inner diameters. The maximum variation of the axial field from its target values is less than 2%. In most parts of the Zeeman slower, the intensity variations of the field in radial spatial distribution are less than 0.1 mT. With this Zeeman slower, the strontium atoms are slowed down to 95 m/s, and approximately 2% of the total atoms are slowed down to less than 50 m/s.