Exploring Interatomic Coulombic Decay by Free Electron Lasers

Abstract

To exploit the high intensity of laser radiation, we propose to select frequencies at which single-photon absorption is of too low energy and two or more photons are needed to produce states of an atom that can undergo interatomic Coulombic decay (ICD) with its neighbors. For Ne dimer it is explicitly demonstrated that the proposed scheme to investigate interatomic processes by multiphoton absorption is much more efficient than with single-photon absorption of sufficiently large frequency as used until now. Extensive calculations on Ne dimer including all the involved nuclear dynamics and the losses by ionization of the participating states show how the low-energy ICD electrons and Ne${}^{+}$ pairs are produced for different laser intensities and pulse durations. At higher intensities the production of Ne${}^{+}$ pairs by successive ionization of the two atoms becomes competitive and the respective emitted electrons interfere coherently with the ICD electrons. It is also demonstrated that a measurement after a time delay can be used to determine the contribution of ICD even at high laser intensity.

5 figures, Supplemental material file

References in corpus (2)

• Strong interference effects in the resonant Auger decay of atoms induced by intense X-Ray fields
• Resonant Auger decay of the core-excited C${}^{\ast }$O molecule in intense X-ray laser fields

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Double-slit photoelectron interference in strong-field ionization of the neon dimer
• Dynamic interference of photoelectrons produced by high-frequency laser pulses
• Coherent intense resonant laser pulses lead to interference in the time domain observable in the spectrum of the emitted particles
• Atomic, molecular and optical physics applications of longitudinally coherent and narrow bandwidth Free-Electron Lasers
• Overcoming blockade in producing doubly-excited dimers by a single intense pulse and their decay
• Photoionization of hydrogen atom by coherent intense high-frequency short laser pulses: Direct propagation of electron wave packets on large spatial grids
• Strong-field photoionization in two-center atomic systems