Title: Creating and Probing Electronic Wavepackets Using Half-Cycle Pulses

R.R. Jones

Abstract:

Ultra-short, nearly unipolar electric field pulses are used to produce novel dynamic states in Rydberg atoms. A single 500 fsec field pulse redistributes essentially all of the population from a single stationary Rydberg state to hundreds of different final states. The dynamic evolultion of the non-stationary wavepacket is monitored using a second, time-delayed pulse. The time-dependent momentum-space probability distribution of the wavepacket can be retrieved experimentally using a classical impulse approximation.

Status: Published, Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 3927 (1996)
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