Shaping interactions between polar molecules with far-off-resonant light

Abstract

We show that dressing polar molecules with a far-off-resonant optical field leads to new types of intermolecular potentials, which undergo a crossover from the inverse-power to oscillating behavior depending on the intermolecular distance, and whose parameters can be tuned by varying the laser intensity and wavelength. We present analytic expressions for the potential energy surfaces, thereby providing direct access to the parameters of an optical field required to design intermolecular interactions experimentally.