George Gibson

Resonant single-photon transitions are ubiquitous in nature and have fundamental important to physics and technology. This includes recent areas of study, such as adiabatic population transfer, electromagnetically induced transparency, cooling and trapping of atoms, slowing and stopping of light, and quantum information. Early work in strong field physics suggested that single photon processes could be extended to multiple photons, with a corresponding increase in the scale of excitation. If so, innershell ionization, multiply excited states, X-ray transitions and X-ray lasers could be accessed through multiphoton transitions with optical or near-UV lasers. In this talk, I will give a general introduction to the behavior of atoms and molecules in high-intensity laser fields, but then focus on a very simple question: under what conditions (if any) is it possible to drive a resonant 20-photon bound-bound transition?