Manipulation of plasma grating by impulsive molecular alignment

We experimentally demonstrated that multiphoton-ionization-induced plasma grating in air could be precisely manipulated by impulsive molecular alignment. In the linear region, the impulsively aligned molecules modulated the diffraction efficiency of the plasma grating for a time-delayed femtosecond laser pulse. In the nonlinear region, the third harmonic generation from the plasma grating was either enhanced or suppressed by following the alignment of the molecules.