Stark-induced adiabatic Raman ladder for preparing highly vibrationally excited quantum states of molecular hydrogen
Nandini Mukherjee, William E. Perreault, Richard N. Zare
Abstract We present a multi-color ladder excitation scheme that exploits Stark-induced adiabatic Raman passage to selectively populate a highly excited vibrational level of a molecule. We suggest that this multi-color coherent ladder excitation provides a practical way of accessing levels near the vibrational dissociation limit as well as the dissociative continuum, which would allow the generation of an entangled pair of fragments with near-zero relative kinetic energy. Specifically, we consider four- and six-photon coherent excitation of molecular hydrogen to high vibrational levels via intermediate vibrational levels, which are pairwise coupled by two-photon resonant interaction. Using a sequence of three partially overlapping, single-mode, nanosecond laser pulses we show that the sixth vibrational level of H 2 , which is too weakly coupled to be easily accessed by direct two-photon Raman excitation from the ground vibrational level, can be efficiently populated without leaving any population stranded in the intermediate level. Furthermore, we show that the fourteenth vibrational level of H 2 , which is the highest vibrational level in the ground electronic state with a binding energy of 22 meV, can be efficiently and selectively populated using a sequence of four pulses. The present technique offers the unique possibility of preparing entangled quantum states of H atoms without resorting to an ultracold system.
Journal of Physics B Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics•Jun 20, 2017•19 citations