Selective Excitation of Metastable Atomic States by Femto- and Attosecond Laser Pulses

In the present work the possibility to achieve high selective excitation of metastable states of atoms by interaction with short laser pulses with reasonable parameters is demonstrated theoretically. Interactions of hydrogen atom with femto- and attosecond laser pulses are studied with the use of well established close-coupling approach. The parameters of laser pulses which lead to high selective excitation of metastable state of atom together with small ionization probability are calculated with the use of different kinds of optimization procedures. Keywords: selective excitation, metastable state, laser control, femtosecond pulse, attosecond pulse The nonlinear laser spectroscopy provides essen-tially new possibilities in nuclear, molecular and opti-cal physics on creation and study of selectively excited states of quantum systems (see [1,2]). Development of the two-photon excitation technique [3] made it possi-ble to obtain metastable atoms of hydrogen H (2S1/2) i