Incoming links: Molecular beam
Physical Review Volume 53, page 318.
Not paywalled as of 2024! A miracle! It is barely one page long.
This is the paper that contains the first successful report of experimental nuclear magnetic moment observation.
They promise more at the end:and this promise was fulfilled on the later The Molecular Beam Resonance Method for Measuring Nuclear Magnetic Moments.
We have tried this experiment with LiC1 and observed the resonance peaks of Li and Cl. The effects are very striking and the resonances sharp (Fig. 1). A full account of this experiment, together with the values of the nuclear moments, will be published when the homogeneous field is recalibrated.
This figure sums it all up: they were measuring the intensity of one side of a molecular beam after a Stern-Gerlach experiment.
Then, they vary the constant magnetic field before the splitting, and at the same time apply a fixed radio frequency to the beam.
When the constant magnetic field makes the energy gap match the radio frequency input, nuclear spin of many atoms goes to the anti-aligned direction, the beam gets diverted, so the previously detected beam gets weaker.
Molecular beams are cool because they create a one dimensional flow of molecules, which makes it easier to observe certain single-molecule effects, as it removes the multi-particle issues from experiments.
Key molecular beam experiments include:
- Stern-Gerlach experiment, which confirmed the existence of spin
- Rabi's NMR experiment, which confirmed the existence of nuclear spin
The center piece of the control system of atomic clocks is a molecular beam.