Manipulating Small Molecules with Intense Laser Fields

We have seen that many of the experiments described above can be discussed in terms of the manipulation of the dissociation dynamics. One can, for example, change the energy spectrum of a particular channel by simply increasing the laser intensity, when the mechanism of bond-softening can occur. Alternatively a double-pulse experiment can excite from a bond-softened state to a Coulomb repulsive state. In fact, by using laser pulses of short duration for the second pulse, one can hope to use the technique of Coulomb explosion imaging (Ellert et al 1998) to monitor the time evolution of a specific dissociation process. Moreover, using Coulomb explosion imaging and position-sensitive detectors one could expect to be able to monitor a change in the geometry of a triatomic molecule on ionisation, for example.