Chaos-assisted adiabatic passage of molecular rotation

The exact dynamics of the rotational degrees of freedom of diatomic molecules, in the presence of sequentially applied radiation pulses, is studied. The radiation pulses induce chaos in the rotational phase space. In the adiabatic limit, this induced chaos is found to cause a transition to high angular momentum states due to chaos induced avoided crossings among Floquet states. The effect of finite temperature on the distribution of transitions is also discussed.