Alignment and bending of by intense femtosecond laser pulses

We report on direct measurements of the angular distributions of fragment ions produced in interactions with 60 fs laser pulses at 750 nm. These distributions show dramatically the bent nature of the dissociating molecule, and allow observation of the alignment of the different dissociation channels. It is found that for the lowest channel of multielectron dissociative ionization, alignment parallel to the laser field is preferred, but orientation perpendicular to the laser field direction is allowed. For the higher channels orientation perpendicular to the field is not allowed. Where possible the distributions measured are compared with those deduced from fits to the double-correlation data of Cornaggia.