Dynamic interference of photoelectrons produced by high-frequency laser pulses

Abstract

The ionization of an atom by a high-frequency intense laser pulse, where the energy of a single-photon is sufficient to ionize the system, is investigated from first principles. It is shown that as a consequence of an AC Stark effect in the continuum, the energy of the photoelectron follows the envelope of the laser pulse. This is demonstrated to result in strong dynamic interference of the photoelectrons of the same kinetic energy emitted at different times. Numerically exact computations on the hydrogen atom demonstrate that the dynamic interference spectacularly modifies the photoionization process and is prominently manifested in the photoelectron spectrum by the appearance of a distinct multi-peak pattern. The general theory is shown to be well approximated by explicit analytical expressions which allow for a transparent understanding of the discovered phenomena and for making predictions on the dependence of the measured spectrum on the properties of the pulse.

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References in corpus (3)

• 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
• Exploring Interatomic Coulombic Decay by Free Electron Lasers

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• Non-adiabatic molecular association in thermal gases driven by radio-frequency pulses
• Spatio-temporal interference of photo electron wave packets and time scale of non-adiabatic transition in high-frequency regime
• Optically-dressed resonant Auger processes induced by high-intensity x rays
• Observation of coherent oscillations in association of dimers from a thermal gas of ultracold atoms
• Floquet approach for dynamics in short and intense laser pulses