Physics Commons^™

Batelaan And Gay Reply, Herman Batelaan, Timothy J. Gay

Timothy J. Gay Publications

In their Comment [1] to our Letter [2], Rutherford and Grobe first disagree with our conclusion that “a tabletop Stern-Gerlach filter is feasible.” Given our estimate of the throughput for such a device, ~0.3 electrons/s, we were clearly not proposing it as an alternative to standard polarized electron sources (~10¹⁵ electrons/s). The main argument for “feasibility” is based on the relatively low currents required to establish the solenoidal magnetic field (5 A)—hence the use of the word “tabletop” in the abstract. In retrospect, a better statement would have been that “experimental demonstration of such a spin-splitting effect may be …