A research paper entitled “Highly Efficient Pumping of Vibrationally Excited HD Molecules via Stark-Induced Adiabatic Raman Passage” has been published recently on the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters（J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2013, 4, 368-371）, which signified an important progress in studies aiming at the realizing of highly efficient coherent transfer of population in HD molecules, carried out by the research team led by Prof. Xueming Yang of the State Key Laboratory of Molecular Dynamics of DICP.

This DICP team, by using a custom-made laser system with narrow line width and high pulse energy, and by employing the SARP (Stark-Induced Adiabatic Raman Passage) technique, was able to transfer successfully the HD molecules in a molecular beam from the vibrational ground state (v = 0, J = 0) to the excited state (v = 1, J = 0), the excitation ratio was higher than 90%. These results confirmed experimentally for the first time that it was a feasible approach to produce vibrationally excited hydrogen and its isotopes from a molecular beam via the SARP technique. Moreover, this method can be extended to molecules with Raman activities, thus providing a unique tool for studying the influence of vibrational excitation of hydrogen and other molecules on chemical reactions by means of cross-molecular-beam and molecular beam-surface scattering experiments.

Patents have been filed for the custm-made OPO/OPA and laser system in this work，and the present research program was supported financially by the State Ministry of Science & Technology of China，the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.