Spectra of molecular gases trapped in deep optical lattices

We study the spectral profile of Rayleigh scattered light from molecular species trapped in optical lattices created by strong fields in the 1016 W m-2 range. We show that, for lattices with well depths on the order of 100 K, the motional sidebands imparted on spectra are shifted from the central Dicke-narrowed Rayleigh peak by hundreds of MHz. Our calculations for these short duration (30 ns) lattices show that these spectral features appear even in room temperature gases suggesting a new technique for measuring gas composition based on the frequency offset of the sidebands. Finally, we study the role of field-induced molecular alignment within the lattice and calculate its effect on the shape and position of the sidebands.