  Ultrashort non-resonant electromagnetic pulses applied to effective
one-electron systems may operate on the electronic state as a position or
momentum translation operator. As derived here, extension to many-body
correlated systems exposes qualitatively new aspects. For instance, to the
lowest order in the electric field intensity the action of the pulse is
expressible in terms of the two-body reduced density matrix enabling thus to
probe various facets of electronic correlations. As an experimental realization
we propose a pump-probe scheme in which after a weak, swift "kick" by the
non-resonant pulse the survival probability for remaining in the initial state
is measured. This probability we correlate to the two-body reduced density
matrix. Since the strength of electronic correlation is bond-length sensitive,
measuring the survival probability may allow for a direct insight into the
bond-dependent two-body correlation in the ground state. As an illustration,
full numerical calculations for two molecular systems are provided and
different measures of electronic correlations are analyzed.
