Optics of a Gas of Coherently Spinning Molecules

Abstract

We consider optical properties of a gas of molecules that are brought to fast unidirectional spinning by a pulsed laser field. It is shown that a circularly polarized probe light passing through the medium inverts its polarization handedness and experiences a frequency shift controllable by the sense and the rate of molecular rotation. Our analysis is supported by two recent experiments on the laser-induced rotational Doppler effect in molecular gases, and provides a good qualitative and quantitative description of the experimental observations.

References in corpus (4)

• Observing Molecular Spinning via the Rotational Doppler Effect
• Control of molecular rotation with a chiral train of ultrashort pulses
• Directional spinning of molecules with sequences of femtosecond pulses
• Molecular spinning by a chiral train of short laser pulses

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Quantum control of molecular rotation
• Visualizing molecular unidirectional rotation
• On the observation of field-free orientation of a symmetric top molecule by terahertz laser pulses at high temperature
• Capture into resonance and phase space dynamics in optical centrifuge
• Giant Polarization Drag in a Gas of Molecular Superrotors
• Rotation of polarization of light propagating through a gas of molecular super-rotors
• Shaping of the time-evolution of field-free molecular orientation by THz laser pulses
• Visualizing coherent molecular rotation in a gaseous medium
• Enhanced Detection of Rotational Doppler Shift from Sunlight