Physical Review A
Adiabatic and diabatic transformations as physical resources for wave packet squeezing
Bo Y. Chang, Sungyul Lee, Ignacio R. Solá, Jesús Santamarı́a
Abstract
We propose a scheme for squeezing vibrational wave packets in the ground (or excited) states of diatomic molecules that uses pulse sequences of strong nonresonant short pulses. The physical mechanism of the scheme is a two step process involving adiabatic and diabatic transformations of the wave packet. The first step is the adiabatic stretching of the wave packet on a light-induced potential, and the second step is dynamic squeezing by free evolution after ultrashort (i.e., diabatic) population transfer. We show that this sequence of transformations can be performed very efficiently with a simple two pulse sequence with slow switch on and fast switch off pulse shapes, and we analyze the required physical resources that are needed. We test the scheme on a model of harmonic oscillators and on the ${\mathrm{Rb}}_{2}$ dimer. Finally, different possible generalizations are proposed.