We study the effect of rotational state–dependent alignment in the scattering of molecules by optical fields. CS₂ 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.

我们研究了依赖于旋转状态的取向在光场对分子散射中的作用。CS ₂处于最低旋转状态的分子被非共振光学驻波绝热排列并横向加速。随着场强的增加，测得的横向速度分布的宽度增加到160 m / s，而其中心峰值位置从10移至-10 m / s。这些变化可以通过基于旋转状态的对齐方式的数值模拟很好地再现，但是在忽略这些影响时无法建模。此外，非共振光场引起的分子散射等于以旋转状态特定的方式操纵分子的平移运动。相反，我们的结果表明，从非谐振光学驻波散射是一种用于选择非极性分子旋转状态的可行方法。