Stark-induced adiabatic Raman ladder for preparing highly vibrationally excited quantum states of molecular hydrogen

Abstract

We present a multi-color ladder excitation scheme that exploits Stark-induced adiabatic Raman passage to selectively populate a highly excited vibrational level of a molecule. We suggest that this multi-color coherent ladder excitation provides a practical way of accessing levels near the vibrational dissociation limit as well as the dissociative continuum, which would allow the generation of an entangled pair of fragments with near-zero relative kinetic energy. Specifically, we consider four- and six-photon coherent excitation of molecular hydrogen to high vibrational levels via intermediate vibrational levels, which are pairwise coupled by two-photon resonant interaction. Using a sequence of three partially overlapping, single-mode, nanosecond laser pulses we show that the sixth vibrational level of H2, which is too weakly coupled to be easily accessed by direct two-photon Raman excitation from the ground vibrational level, can be efficiently populated without leaving any population stranded in the intermediate level. Furthermore, we show that the fourteenth vibrational level of H2, which is the highest vibrational level in the ground electronic state with a binding energy of 22 meV, can be efficiently and selectively populated using a sequence of four pulses. The present technique offers the unique possibility of preparing entangled quantum states of H atoms without resorting to an ultracold system.