Rotational echo spectroscopy for accurate measurement of molecular alignment

Abstract

We measure the molecular alignment induced in gas using molecular rotational echo spectroscopy. Our results show that the echo intensity and the time interval between the local extremas of the echo responses depend sensitively on the pump intensities and the initial molecular rotational temperature, respectively. This allows us to accurately extract these experimental parameters from the echo signals and then further determine the molecular alignment in experiments. The accuracy of our method has been verified by comparing the simulation with the extracted parameters from the molecular alignment experiment performed with a femtosecond pump pulse.