Investigation of the helium dimer vibrational wavefunction using strong laser-fields

Abstract

The Helium Dimer (4He2), being the largest and most weakly bound diatomic molecule, is a unique system for probing quantum mechanical properties. Recent Experiments did first steps towards measuring the distribution of internuclear distances of the dimer. These measurements, however, only yielded a subset of bond length appearing in the ground state of the Helium dimer. Here we used cold target recoil ion momentum spectroscopy (COLTRIMS) and a femtosecond laser to map its complete vibrational wavefunction and gather the distribution of bond lengths in a much larger range. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.