Effective Excitation of High Vibrational States of SF₆ Molecules in a Beam by a Multiple-frequency IR Radiation

Abstract

Presented here are the first results of experiments on multiple-photon excitation (MPE) of molecules upon their being concurrently irradiated by several IR pulses differing in frequency. Effective population of the high vibrational states (HVS) of SF₆ was found to occur even when the frequencies of exciting pulses were fairly far (10–20 cm^–1) from the linear absorption spectrum (LAS) of the molecules. The method enables one to obtain narrow vibrational distributions of excited molecules (VDEM) and make a wider use of the capabilities of IR lasers for selective photochemistry purposes.