Chapter 13: Femtosecond (fs) Pulse Pair Excitation

This chapter deals with optical excitation of molecules with femtosecond laser pulses (lO15 s). The molecular dynamics on the Born-Oppenheimer potential energy surfaces is treated together with the time dependence of the laser pulse or pulses in a single unified framework. In this chapter we will concentrate on the effect on a molecule of one or several unshaped femtosecond pulses. The applications of this treatment includes the fascinating field of femtochemistry, including the real time probing and clocking of chemical reactions, as well as nonlinear femtosecond spectroscopy. Ch. 16 discusses many additional interesting effects that occur when one or several optical pulses arc shaped in amplitude or phase using sophisticated techniques of pulse shaping.