Abstract

The interaction of short light pulses with multilevel systems generates some interesting states of both the light pulse and the system it excites. For example, recent investigations into the excitation of vibrational wave packets in small molecules have shown some striking nonclassical effects, such as decays and revivals¹ and quantum interference.² It has also been shown theoretically that the generation of squeezed vibrational states is possible,³ in the sense that the positional uncertainty of a vibrational wave packet may be smaller than that of the oscillator’s ground state. The key idea is that the transition between the two relevant vibrational potentials is nonadiabatic. Thus the important parameters in determining the degree of squeezing are the exciting-pulse duration and the ratio of the vibrational frequencies in the two potentials. Furthermore, the phase of the squeezing is determined by the chirp of the pulse and by the degree to which the molecular potentials are anharmonic.

© 1993 Optical Society of America