Abstract

Laser-induced alignment and orientation of gas phase molecules provide on-demand access to anisotropic angular distributions of molecular ensembles. Recently we have compared between the field-free alignment and orientation dynamics of few gasses and found that transiently oriented molecules decay at a faster rate than transiently aligned samples [1, 2]. I will present our findings and discuss three complementary experimental evidences of the phenomenon. In the second part, I will present recent results of rotational echoes in multi-level system [3] and how they differ from echoes typically measured in two-level systems (as typically done in magnetic resonance).