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Updated: Jul 25, 2026

Direct Imaging of Laser-driven Ultrafast Molecular Rotation
Published on: February 4, 2017
Coherent molecular optics using ultracold sodium dimers
J R Abo-Shaeer1, D E Miller, J K Chin
1Department of Physics, MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, and Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. jrabo-shaeer@lbl.gov
Abstract:
Coherent molecular optics is performed using two-photon Bragg scattering. Molecules were produced by sweeping an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate through a Feshbach resonance. The spectral width of the molecular Bragg resonance corresponded to an instantaneous temperature of 20 nK, indicating that atomic coherence was transferred directly to the molecules. An autocorrelating interference technique was used to observe the quadratic spatial dependence of the phase of an expanding molecular cloud. Finally, atoms initially prepared in two momentum states were observed to cross pair with one another, forming molecules in a third momentum state. This process is analogous to sum-frequency generation in optics.
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