Selective excitation of vibrational overtones in an anharmonic ladder with frequency- and amplitude-modulated laser pulses

Abstract
We show numerically that the complex hyperbolic secant pulse provides robust selective inversion of vibrational overtones. A density-matrix analysis is performed for a ten-level Morse-oscillator approximation of a diatomic molecule. We also show that in the limit of adiabatic excitation the complex-hyperbolic-secant pulse yields an inversion spectrum that is narrower than its spectral bandwidth.