Optics of a Gas of Coherently Spinning Molecules

We consider the optical properties of a gas of molecules that are brought to fast unidirectional spinning by a pulsed laser field. It is shown that a circularly polarized probe light passing through the medium inverts its polarization handedness and experiences a frequency shift controllable by the sense and the rate of molecular rotation. Our analysis is supported by two recent experiments on the laser-induced rotational Doppler effect in molecular gases and provides a good qualitative and quantitative description of the experimental observations.