  Star formation in the inner few hundred pc of the Galactic bulge occurs in a
flattened molecular layer called the central molecular zone (CMZ). Serabyn &
Morris (1996) suggest that the star formation in the CMZ has been sustained for
the lifetime of the Galaxy, and that the resulting agglomeration of stars
formed in the CMZ has resulted in the prominent r^-2 stellar density cusp at
the Galactic center having about the same physical extent as the CMZ. This
"central cusp" is somewhat less flat than the CMZ; thus the population of stars
formed in the CMZ appears to have diffused out to larger latitudes. We
hypothesize that such vertical diffusion is driven by the scattering of stars
off the giant molecular clouds (GMC) in the CMZ, and perform numerical
simulations of the scattering between stars and GMCs in the presence of the
non-axisymmetric background potential. The simulation results show that the
time scale for an initially flattened stellar population to achieve an aspect
ratio of the observed OH/IR stars in the inner bulge, 1 to 2 Gyr, agrees well
with the estimated age of those OH/IR stars.
