Abstract
Photodissociation of molecular ions in a beam from an ion source has been studied with intense femtosecond laser pulses. Using a high-resolution velocity imaging technique, the neutral fragments from single vibrational levels of the molecules have been resolved. The effects of one- and net two-photon bond softening: level shifting, vibrational trapping, and molecular alignment are observed in the kinetic energy and angular distributions and are discussed in detail. In comparison with our previous study on , we observe smaller widths of the peaks in the kinetic energy distributions of the fragments from single vibrational levels. We attribute this to the longer lifetimes of vibrational states in the light-induced potentials. The width of the angular distributions increases for lowest fragment energies, which suggests vibrational trapping of the levels close to the three-photon crossing.
1 More- Received 31 August 2005
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.72.053413
©2005 American Physical Society