Using the example of laser-assisted photoionization, we analyse the interplay of an intense laser field and the atomic/molecular potential during the electron motion after ionization. We give conditions to determine when the electron's oscillations in the strong laser field are approximately decoupled from its acceleration in the ionic potential, and when they are not. Excellent agreement between analytical and numerical results allows us to assess the recipes for analysing interference structures in high harmonic generation in molecules.

We suggest a novel way to use strong Rydberg dipole-dipole interactions in order to induce non-trivial conditional dynamics in individual-atom systems and mesoscopic ensembles. Contrary to previous works, we suggest to excite atoms into different Rydberg states, which results in a potentially richer dynamical behaviour. Specifically, we investigate systems of individual hydrogenlike atoms or mesoscopic ensembles excited into high-lying hydrogen-like s, p or d states and show how to perform three-qubit conditional dynamics on the information they contain through a proper use of dipole-dipole interaction induced energy shifts.

Controlling the translational motion of cold atoms using optical lattice potentials is of both theoretical and experimental interest. By designing two on-resonance time sequences of kicking optical lattice potentials, a novel connection between two paradigms of nonlinear mapping systems, i.e., the kicked rotor model and the kicked Harper model, is established.In particular, it is shown that Hofstadter's butterfly quasi-energy spectrum in periodically driven quantum systems may soon be realized experimentally, with the effective Planck constant tunable by varying the time delay between two sequences of control fields. Extensions of this study are also discussed. The results are intended to open up a new generation of cold-atom experiments of quantum nonlinear dynamics.

We show how the rotational quantum state of a linear or symmetric top rotor can be reconstructed from finite time observations of the polar angular distribution under certain conditions. The presented tomographic method can reconstruct the complete rotational quantum state in many non-adiabatic alignment experiments. Our analysis applies for measurement data available with existing measurement techniques.