Journal
ISRAEL JOURNAL OF CHEMISTRY
Volume 52, Issue 5, Pages 414-437Publisher
WILEY-V C H VERLAG GMBH
DOI: 10.1002/ijch.201100161
Keywords
molecular alignment; femtosecond laser pulses; control of molecular rotation and motion; rotational spectroscopy
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Funding
- Israel Science Foundation
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
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Spectroscopy aims at extracting information about matter through its interaction with light. However, when performed on gas and liquid phases as well as solid phases lacking long-range order, the extracted spectroscopic features are in fact averaged over the molecular isotropic angular distributions. The reason is that lightmatter processes depend on the angle between the transitional molecular dipole and the polarization of the light interacting with it. This understanding gave birth to the constantly expanding field of laser-induced molecular alignment. In this paper, we attempt to guide the readers through our involvement (both experimental and theoretical) in this field in the last few years. We start with the basic phenomenon of molecular alignment induced by a single pulse, continue with selective alignment of close molecular species and unidirectional molecular rotation induced by two time-delayed pulses, and lead up to novel schemes for manipulating the spatial distributions of molecular samples through rotationally controlled scattering off inhomogeneous fields and surfaces.
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