Theory of diatomic molecules in an external electromagnetic field from first quantum mechanical principles

We study a general problem of the translational/rotational/vibrational/electronic dynamics of a diatomic molecule exposed to an interaction with an arbitrary external electromagnetic field. The theory developed in this paper is relevant to a variety of specific applications. Such as, alignment or orientation of molecules by lasers, trapping of ultracold molecules in optical traps, molecular optics and interferometry, rovibrational spectroscopy of molecules in the presence of intense laser light, or generation of high order harmonics from molecules. Starting from the first quantum mechanical principles, we derive an appropriate molecular Hamiltonian suitable for description of the center of mass, rotational, vibrational and electronic molecular motions driven by the field within the electric dipole approximation. Consequently, the concept of the Born-Oppenheimer separation between the electronic and the nuclear degrees of freedom in the presence of an electromagnetic field is introduced. Special cases of the dc/ac field limits are then discussed separately. Finally, we consider a perturbative regime of a weak dc/ac field, and obtain simple analytic formulas for the associated Born-Oppenheimer translational/rotational/vibrational molecular Hamiltonian

Entanglement and spin squeezing in non-Hermitian phase transitions

We show that non-Hermitian dynamics generate substantial entanglement in many-body systems. We consider the non-Hermitian Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model and show that its phase transition occurs with maximum multiparticle entanglement: there is full N-particle entanglement at the transition, in contrast to the Hermitian case. The non-Hermitian model also exhibits more spin squeezing than the Hermitian model, showing that non-Hermitian dynamics are useful for quantum metrology. Experimental implementations with trapped ions and cavity QED are discussed.Comment: 5 pages + appendi

Amplification of High Harmonics Using Weak Perturbative High Frequency Radiation

The mechanism underlying the substantial amplification of the high-order harmonics q \pm 2K (K integer) upon the addition of a weak seed XUV field of harmonic frequency q\omega to a strong IR field of frequency \omega is analyzed in the framework of the quantum-mechanical Floquet formalism and the semiclassical re-collision model. According to the Floquet analysis, the high-frequency field induces transitions between several Floquet states and leads to the appearance of new dipole cross terms. The semiclassical re-collision model suggests that the origin of the enhancement lies in the time-dependent modulation of the ground electronic state induced by the XUV field.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

Adiabatic theorem for non-hermitian time-dependent open systems

In the conventional quantum mechanics (i.e., hermitian QM) the adia- batic theorem for systems subjected to time periodic fields holds only for bound systems and not for open ones (where ionization and dissociation take place) [D. W. Hone, R. Ketzmerik, and W. Kohn, Phys. Rev. A 56, 4045 (1997)]. Here with the help of the (t,t') formalism combined with the complex scaling method we derive an adiabatic theorem for open systems and provide an analytical criteria for the validity of the adiabatic limit. The use of the complex scaling transformation plays a key role in our derivation. As a numerical example we apply the adiabatic theorem we derived to a 1D model Hamiltonian of Xe atom which interacts with strong, monochromatic sine-square laser pulses. We show that the gener- ation of odd-order harmonics and the absence of hyper-Raman lines, even when the pulses are extremely short, can be explained with the help of the adiabatic theorem we derived