Hannover 2020 – scientific programme
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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik
MO 3: Chiral Molecules
MO 3.5: Talk
Monday, March 9, 2020, 15:15–15:30, f102
Controlling the axis of rotation in polyatomic molecules with the optical centrifuge — •Emil Zak1, Andrey Yachmenev1,2, and Jochen Küpper1,2,3 — 1Center for Free-Electron Laser Science, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Notkestrasse 85, Hamburg — 2Center for Ultrafast Imaging, Universität Hamburg — 3Department of Physics, Universität Hamburg
Due to their electronic polarizability, molecules can align with their most polarizable axis along the direction of an electric field. We showed that with the use of an optical centrifuge it is possible to control which two principal polarizability axes of the molecule align in the plane of the electric field. We computationally demonstrated concepts of controlling the pathway of rotational excitation through robust modifications of the centrifuge field, without the need for modulations of the field intensity, which was demonstrated before [1]. On the examples of D2S and 2H-imidazole molecules we generated practically arbitrary coherent superpositions of rotational states, in which the molecule rotates simultaneously along the two different stable principal axes a and c. The proposed new method of tailoring rotational wavepackets provides the possibility of steering the 3D probability density of atoms in the molecule, e.g., to control the stereodynamics in reactive scattering experiments or to customly align even complex molecules in 3D space. [1] A. Owens, A. Yachmenev, J. Küpper, J. Chem. Phys. Lett. 9, 4206 (2018), *arXiv:1807.04016 [physics]