Shaping interactions between polar molecules with far-off-resonant light

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how far-off-resonant light can be used to control and tune the interactions between polar molecules, enabling new potential energy landscapes for experimental design.

Contribution

It introduces analytic expressions for optically controlled intermolecular potentials, showing how laser parameters influence interaction behavior.

Findings

Intermolecular potentials can be tuned from inverse-power to oscillating forms.

Potential energy surfaces are analytically derived for experimental applications.

Laser intensity and wavelength control the interaction characteristics.

Abstract

We show that dressing polar molecules with a far-off-resonant optical field leads to new types of intermolecular potentials, which undergo a crossover from the inverse-power to oscillating behavior depending on the intermolecular distance, and whose parameters can be tuned by varying the laser intensity and wavelength. We present analytic expressions for the potential energy surfaces, thereby providing direct access to the parameters of an optical field required to design intermolecular interactions experimentally.