Molecular vibrational trapping revisited: a case study with D2+

The present theoretical study is concerned with the vibrational trapping or bond hardening, which is a well-known phenomenon predicted by a dressed state representation of small molecules like [Image: see text] and [Image: see text]in an intense laser field. This phenomenon is associated with a condition where the energy of the light induced, vibrational level coincides with one of the vibrational levels on the field-free potential curve, which at the same time maximizes the wave function overlap between these two levels. One-dimensional numerical simulations were performed to investigate this phenomenon in a more quantitative way than has been done previously by calculating the photodissociation probability of [Image: see text] for a wide range of photon energy. The obtained results undoubtedly show that the nodal structure of the field-free vibrational wave functions plays a decisive role in the vibrational trapping, in addition to the current understanding of this phenomenon.