Computational study of alkali-metal-noble-gas collisions in the presence of nonresonant lasers:Na+Xe+ℏω1+ℏω2system

The collision of Na with Xe in the presence of both the rhodamine-110 dye laser and the Nd: glass laser is investigated within a quantum-mechanical close-coupled formalism, utilizing ab initio potential curves and transition dipole matrix elements. Both one- and two-photon processes are investigated; the Na + Xe system is not asymptotically resonant with the radiation fields, so that these processes can only occur in the molecular collision region. The one-photon processes are found to have measurable cross sections at relatively low intensities; even the two-photon process has a significant cross section for field intensities as low as 10 MW/${\mathrm{cm}}^2$.