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Updated: May 7, 2026

Direct Imaging of Laser-driven Ultrafast Molecular Rotation
Published on: February 4, 2017
Controlling the femtosecond laser-driven transformation of dicyclopentadiene into cyclopentadiene
Tapas Goswami1, Dipak K Das, Debabrata Goswami
1Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur 208016, India.
Abstract:
Dynamics of the chemical transformation of dicyclopentadiene into cyclopentadiene in a supersonic molecular beam is elucidated using femtosecond time-resolved degenerate pump-probe mass spectrometry. Control of this ultrafast chemical reaction is achieved by using linearly chirped frequency modulated pulses. We show that negatively chirped femtosecond laser pulses enhance the cyclopentadiene photo-product yield by an order of magnitude as compared to that of the unmodulated or the positively chirped pulses. This demonstrates that the phase structure of femtosecond laser pulse plays an important role in determining the outcome of a chemical reaction.
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