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Optics of a Gas of Coherently Spinning Molecules

Optics 2015-06-17 v1

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1308.5590,
  title  = {Optics of a Gas of Coherently Spinning Molecules},
  author = {Uri Steinitz and Yehiam Prior and Ilya Sh. Averbukh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1308.5590},
  year   = {2015}
}