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Updated: Mar 29, 2026

Direct Imaging of Laser-driven Ultrafast Molecular Rotation
Published on: February 4, 2017
Observation of Bloch Oscillations in Molecular Rotation
Johannes Floß1, Andrei Kamalov2, Ilya Sh Averbukh1
1Department of Chemical Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science, 234 Herzl Street, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
Abstract:
We report the observation of rotational Bloch oscillations in a gas of nitrogen molecules kicked by a periodic train of femtosecond laser pulses. A controllable detuning from the quantum resonance creates an effective accelerating potential in angular momentum space, inducing Bloch-like oscillations of the rotational excitation. These oscillations are measured via the temporal modulation of the refractive index of the gas. Our results introduce room-temperature laser-kicked molecules as a new laboratory for studies of localization phenomena in quantum transport.
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