Nonsequential Double Ionization with Polarization-gated Pulses

Abstract

We investigate laser-induced nonsequential double ionization by a polarization-gated laser pulse, constructed employing two counter-rotating circularly polarized few cycle pulses with a time delay $T_d$. We address the problem within a classical framework, and mimic the behavior of the quantum-mechanical electronic wave packet by means of an ensemble of classical electron trajectories. These trajectories are initially weighted with the quasi-static tunneling rate, and with suitably chosen distributions for the momentum components parallel and perpendicular to the laser-field polarization, in the temporal region for which it is nearly linearly polarized. We show that, if the time delay $T_d$ is of the order of the pulse length, the electron-momentum distributions, as functions of the parallel momentum components, are highly asymmetric and dependent on the carrier-envelope (CE) phase. As this delay is decreased, this asymmetry gradually vanishes. We explain this behavior in terms of the available phase space, the quasi-static tunneling rate and the recollision rate for the first electron, for different sets of trajectories. Our results show that polarization-gating technique may provide an efficient way to study the NSDI dynamics in the single-cycle limit, without employing few-cycle pulses.

17 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Classical collisional trajectories as the source of strong-field double ionization of helium in the knee regime
• Electron-electron dynamics in laser-induced nonsequential double ionization
• Nonsequential double ionization with few-cycle laser pulses
• Correlated electron emission in laser-induced nonsequence double ionization of Helium
• Classical and quantum-mechanical treatments of nonsequential double ionization with few-cycle laser pulses
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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Time-delayed nonsequential double ionization with few-cycle laser pulses: importance of the carrier-envelope phase
• Dialogue on analytical and ab initio methods in attoscience
• Detangling the quantum tapestry of intra-channel interference in below-threshold nonsequential double ionization with few-cycle laser pulses