Coherent Phenomena in Molecular Physics

The introduction of coherent control has empowered studies of chemical physics since the mid-eighties, when this approach has emerged, striving to go beyond understanding to controlling molecular motions, using the coherence property of laser fields. Before this conceptual shift, the standard, incoherent tools such as temperature, pressure, and chemical catalysts were used. It did not take long for the analogy of coherent control of chemical dynamics to the application of phase in optics and physics to be understood. Only more recently it was realized that the most important application of coherent control is to understand chemical dynamics. This led to what we refer to as coherent spectroscopy – a field that aims to understand molecular motions and uses to that end the coherence property of light, rather than temperature or pressure.

Given the above background, our goal in the present Research Topic is to discuss the current status of the fields of coherent control, coherence spectroscopy, and more generally coherent phenomena in chemical physics, and to point to future directions. The list of proposed contributions is broad and interdisciplinary, including themes such as:
• the formalism of wavepacket dynamics
• coherent control in both time and energy domains
• coherent optics
• coherent alignment
• high harmonic generation
• imaging
• plasmonics
• quantum computing
• numerical approaches to electronic structure methods.