  We have found recently that, in a supersonic expansion of a mixture of two
monoatomic gases, the parallel temperatures of the two gases can be very
different. This effect is large if the seeded gas is highly diluted and if its
atomic mass is considerably smaller than the one of the carrier gas. In the
present paper, we present a complete derivation of our theoretical analysis of
this effect. Our calculation is a natural extension of the existing theory of
supersonic cooling to the case of a gas mixture, in the high dilution limit.
Finally, we describe a set of temperature measurements made on a beam of
lithium seeded in argon. Our experimental results are in very good agreement
with the results of our calculation.
