Selective Excitation of Metastable Atomic States by Femto- and Attosecond Laser Pulses

Published

September 1, 2006

Author(s)

A D. Kondorskiy, L P. Presnyakov, Yuri Ralchenko

Abstract

The possibility to achieve high selective excitation of low metastable states of hydrogen and helium atoms by using short laser pulses with reasonable parameters is demonstrated theoretically. Interactions of atoms with laser field are studied by solving the close-coupling equations without discretization. The parameters of laser pulses are calculated using different kinds of optimization procedures. For the excitation durations of hundreds of femtoseconds direct optimization of the parameters of one and two laser pulses with Gaussian envelope is used to introduce a number of simple schemes of selective excitation. To treat the case of shorter excitation durations the optimal control theory is used and the calculated optimal fields are approximated by sequences of pulses with reasonable shapes. A new way to achieve selective excitation of metastable atomic states by using sequences of attosecond pulses is introduced.

Citation

Physical Review A (Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics)

Volume

74 No 3

Pub Type

Journals

Keywords

metastable atomic states, optimal control theory, selective excitation

Citation

Kondorskiy, A. , Presnyakov, L. and Ralchenko, Y. (2006), Selective Excitation of Metastable Atomic States by Femto- and Attosecond Laser Pulses, Physical Review A (Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics) (Accessed May 2, 2024)