Figure 5: Laser-field control of asymmetric hydrogen bond breaking.
From: Subfemtosecond steering of hydrocarbon deprotonation through superposition of vibrational modes
(a) Electric field waveform of the near-single-cycle laser pulse used in the calculations (red line). The parts of the field that act on the neutral and cation are displayed as blue and green lines, respectively. (b) Population of the IR-active mode |10>. The population induced in the neutral molecule is shown as blue line. At the peak of the laser field (t1), the |10> population is transferred to the cation and its evolution is shown as the green line. Recollisional excitation, 1.7 fs (t2) later, transfers the population to the A3Πu state of the dication, from where dissociation can occur. Now the eigenfunctions constituting the vibrational wave packet are continuum wavefunctions. Without ionization, interaction with the entire field would induce only a transient population shown as red line, which vanishes with the end of the laser pulse.
