Coherent control of bond making

Liat Levin, Wojciech Skomorowski, Leonid Rybak, Ronnie Kosloff, Christiane P. Koch, Zohar Amitay

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

73 Scopus citations

Abstract

We demonstrate coherent control of bond making, a milestone on the way to coherent control of photoinduced bimolecular chemical reactions. In strong-field multiphoton femtosecond photoassociation experiments, we find the yield of detected magnesium dimer molecules to be enhanced for positively chirped pulses and suppressed for negatively chirped pulses. Our ab initio model shows that control is achieved by purification combined with chirp-dependent Raman transitions. Experimental closed-loop phase optimization using a learning algorithm yields an improved pulse that utilizes vibrational coherent dynamics in addition to chirp-dependent Raman transitions. Our results show that coherent control of binary photoreactions is feasible even under thermal conditions.

Original languageEnglish
Article number233003
JournalPhysical Review Letters
Volume114
Issue number23
DOIs
StatePublished - 10 Jun 2015

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 American Physical Society.

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Coherent control of bond making'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this