Many-electron dynamics triggered by massively parallel ionization

Abstract

Massively parallel ionization of many atoms in a cluster or bio-molecule is identified as new phenomenon of light-matter interaction which becomes feasible through short and intense FEL pulses. Almost simultaneously emitted from the illuminated target the photo-electrons can have such a high density that they interact substantially even after photo-ionization. This interaction results in a characteristic electron spectrum which can be interpreted as convolution of a mean-field electron dynamics and binary electron-electron collisions. We demonstrate that this universal spectrum can be obtained analytically by summing synthetic two-body Coulomb collision events. Moreover, we propose an experiment with hydrogen clusters to observe massively parallel ionization.

4 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Capture into Rydberg states and momentum distributions of ionized electrons
• Ionization heating in rare-gas clusters under intense XUV laser pulses
• Rare-gas clusters in intense VUV, XUV and soft x-ray pulses: Signatures of the transition from nanoplasma-driven cluster expansion to Coulomb explosion in ion and electron spectra
• Tracing non-equilibrium plasma dynamics on the attosecond timescale in small clusters
• Dynamics of photo-activated Coulomb complexes

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Atomic ionization by twisted photons: Angular distribution of emitted electrons
• Efficient electronic structure calculation for molecular ionization dynamics at high x-ray intensity
• Proton ejection from molecular hydride clusters exposed to strong X-ray pulses
• Spatial correlations in finite samples revealed by Coulomb explosion
• Slow electrons from clusters in strong Xray pulses