Scattering of adiabatically aligned molecules by nonresonant optical standing waves

We study the effect of rotational state–dependent alignment in the scattering of molecules by optical fields. CS(2) molecules in their lowest few rotational states are adiabatically aligned and transversely accelerated by a nonresonant optical standing wave. The width of the measured transverse velocity distribution increases to 160 m/s with the field intensity, while its central peak position moves from 10 to −10 m/s. These changes are well reproduced by numerical simulations based on the rotational state–dependent alignment but cannot be modeled when ignoring these effects. Moreover, the molecular scattering by an off-resonant optical field amounts to manipulating the translational motion of molecules in a rotational state–specific way. Conversely, our results demonstrate that scattering from a nonresonant optical standing wave is a viable method for rotational state selection of nonpolar molecules.