Laser control of the RbCs bond

Abstract

We show numerically that it is possible to control the bond distance of the RbCs dimer and create laser-induced oscillations using a single chirped pulse. The implementation of the scheme involves the creation of a superposition of the 1 (3)Sigma(+) and 2 (3)Sigma(+) excited triplet electronic states. We assume that the molecule is aligned and the dynamics is initiated in the bound 2 (3)Sigma(+) state. The chirped pulse allows full population transfer and dynamic vibrational trapping in the 1 (3)Sigma(+) state. In the adiabatic regime the position of the vibrational wave packet can be fully controlled by the carrier frequency of the field, so that one can determine and fix the bond length at any desired value, or impose particular trajectories, depending on the choice of the chirp.