Desire to control the outcome of chemical processes has been driving the efforts of chemists and physicists for many decades. The conventional methods use catalysts, temperature, or pressure, and provide only a limited control without the desired selectivity.
The global objective of our work is to develop understanding about bimolecular collisions involving atoms and molecules in Rydberg states and explore the possibilities to control them by means of laser manipulation. Before this can be achieved, several associated questions must be answered:
- How to efficiently and coherently handle the population of Rydberg levels?
- Since laser manipulation is the preferred choice for handling atomic and molecular excitation, what happens when the molecules interact with strong laser fields?
- How to learn the molecular parameters (lifetimes, branching data) using a cw setup?
- How the stochastic phenomena influence the dynamics of bimolecular processes?