Knowledge Bank

Despite their inherent broad bandwidth femtosecond lasers have been shown to be capable of providing spectroscopic information with resolution rivaling that of high resolution $spectroscopy.1$ This ability is based on the coherent excitation of several vibrational states, within the initial excitation, forming a wave packet. The motion of the wave packet is then monitored as a function of delay time between excitation and monitoring pulses. Fourier transformation of the data provides the vibrational levels composing the wave packet. It is worth noting that all rotational information may be supressed by setting the polarization between excitation and probing lasers at "magic" angle. Rotational information may be obtained for parallel or perpendicular polarization in the form of rotational recurrences. In this talk we will present recent experimental results from bound states at high energies near the dissociation continuum. We will also discuss a simple inversion method used to obtain the potential energy curve directly from the time-resolved $data.2$