  We have designed and implemented a new Stark decelerator based on wire
electrodes, which is suitable for ultrahigh vacuum applications. The 100
deceleration stages are fashioned out of 0.6 mm diameter tantalum and the
array's total length is 110 mm, approximately 10 times smaller than a
conventional Stark decelerator with the same number of electrode pairs. Using
the wire decelerator, we have removed more than 90% of the kinetic energy from
metastable CO molecules in a beam.
