Scattering of adiabatically aligned molecules by nonresonant optical standing waves

We study the effect of rotational state-dependent alignment in the scattering of molecules by optical fields. CS₂ molecules in their lowest few rotational states are adiabatically aligned and transversely accelerated by a nonresonant optical standing wave. The width of the measured transverse velocity distribution increases to 160 m/s with the field intensity, while its central peak position moves from 10 to -10 m/s. These changes are well reproduced by numerical simulations based on the rotational state-dependent alignment but cannot be modeled when ignoring these effects. Moreover, the molecular scattering by an off-resonant optical field amounts to manipulating the translational motion of molecules in a rotational state-specific way. Conversely, our results demonstrate that scattering from a nonresonant optical standing wave is a viable method for rotational state selection of nonpolar molecules.