Multiple orbital effects in laser-induced electron diffraction of aligned molecules

Abstract

Photoelectron Angular Distributions (PADs) resulting from 800 nm and 1300 nm strong field ionization of impulsively aligned CF${}_3$I molecules were analyzed using time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT). The normalized difference between the PADs for aligned and anti-aligned molecules displays large modulations in the high-energy re-collision plateau that are assigned to the diffraction of back-scattered photoelectrons. The TDDFT calculations reveal that, in spite of their 2.6 eV energy difference, ionization from the HOMO-1 orbital contributes to the diffraction pattern on the same footing as ionization from the doubly degenerate HOMO orbital.

References in corpus (5)

• Quantitative rescattering theory for laser-induced high-energy plateau photoelectron spectra
• Diffractive Imaging of Coherent Nuclear Motion in Isolated Molecules
• Self-referenced coherent diffraction x-ray movie of Angstrom- and femtosecond-scale atomic motion
• Modeling electron dynamics coupled to continuum states in finite volumes
• Efficient and accurate modeling of electron photoemission in nanostructures with TDDFT