Highly multiphoton molecular excitation by an intense laser pulse

Multiphoton excitation of molecules by an intense laser field is treated. When the first excitation energy is much larger than both the photon energy and the transition energy between excited states, excited states are strongly coupled with each other by the photon, even though coupling with the ground state is weak. In such a case, a kind of collective excitation takes places, in which the excitation probability of every excited state is almost linear as functions of intensity on a log-log plot, and the slope is independent of the final state. By taking methane and formaldehyde as examples we numerically study this process.