Femtosecond light source for phase-controlled atomic processes

Recent experiments have shown that coherent molecular oscillations may generate a comb of coherent collinear sidebands with 50,000 cm^-1 of spectral bandwidth. The essence of this technique is the use of a Raman transition with a sufficiently large coherence that the generation and phase slip length are of the same order. The coherence is established by driving the molecular transition with two single-mode laser fields slightly detuned from the Raman resonance, so as to excite a single molecular superposition state. This talk will summarize the characteristics of this light source and describe two recent experiments which show the mutual coherence of the generated sidebands