Population Redistribution Among Multiple Electronic States of Molecular Nitrogen Ions in Strong Laser Fields.

Generation of elliptically polarized nitrogen ion laser fields using two-color femtosecond laser pulses.

We experimentally investigate generation of nitrogen molecular ion (N2+) lasers with two femtosecond laser pulses at different wavelengths. The first pulse serves as the pump which ionizes the nitrogen molecules and excites the molecular ions to excited electronic states. The second pulse serves as the probe which leads to stimulated emission from the excited molecular ions. We observe that cha...

Optical gain in rotationally excited nitrogen molecular ions

We pump low-pressure nitrogen gas with ionizing femtosecond laser pulses at 1.5 μm wavelength. The resulting rotationally excited N2 molecular ions generate directional, forward-propagating stimulated and isotropic spontaneous emissions at 428 nm wavelength. Through high-resolution spectroscopy of these emissions, we quantify rotational population distributions in the upper and lower emission l...

Sub-10-fs population inversion in N2+ in air lasing through multiple state coupling

Laser filamentation generated when intense laser pulses propagate in air has been an attractive phenomenon having a variety of potential applications such as detection and spectroscopy of gases at far distant places. It was discovered recently that the filamentation in air induces 'lasing', showing that electronically excited N2(+) is population-inverted, exhibiting marked contrast to the commo...

Complex-scaling generalized pseudospectral method for quasienergy resonance states in two-center systems: Application to the Floquet study of charge resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization of molecular ions in intense low-frequency laser fields

We present a complex-scaling generalized pseudospectral method for accurate and efficient treatment of resonance states in two-center molecular systems, involving optimal nonuniform grid discretization of the Hamiltonian in prolate spheroidal coordinates. The procedure is applied to the first converged non-Hermitian Floquet study of multiphoton ionization of molecular ions in intense low-freque...

Redistribution of vibrational population in a molecular ion with nonresonant strong-field laser pulses