Laser assists excitation transfer in collisions

In an experiment that introduces a completely new approach to inelastic collisions, the transfer of excitation from one atom to another has been enormously enhanced by resonant optical irradiation. Incident laser light was tuned to a wavelength corresponding to the energy difference between the final and initial states of the colliding atoms. The experiments, in which the 5p strontium atoms transferred their excitation energy to 6s calcium atoms, was performed at Stanford University by Stephen Harris, Roger Falcone, William Green, Derek Lidow, Jonathan White and James Young.