Sub-femtosecond tracing of molecular dynamics during strong-field interaction

Abstract

We introduce and experimentally demonstrate a method, where the two intrinsic time scales of a molecule, the slow nuclear motion and the fast electronic motion, are simultaneously measured in a photo-electron photo-ion coincidence experiment. In our experiment, elliptically polarized, 750~nm, 4.5~fs laser pulses were focused to an intensity of $9\times 10^{14}{W/cm}^2$ onto H${}_2$. Using coincidence imaging, we directly observe the nuclear wavepacket evolving on the \ssg{} state of H${}_2^{+}$ during its first roundtrip with attosecond temporal and picometer spatial resolution. The demonstrated method should enable insight into the first few femtoseconds of the vibronic dynamics of ionization-induced unimolecular reactions of larger molecules.

References in corpus (5)

• Multiorbital tunneling ionization of the CO molecule
• Attosecond-recollision-controlled selective fragmentation of polyatomic molecules
• Probing the tunneling site of electrons in strong field enhanced ionization of molecules
• Laser-sub-cycle two-dimensional electron momentum mapping using orthogonal two-color fields
• Disentangling intra-cycle interferences in photoelectron momentum distributions using orthogonal two-colour laser fields

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Experimental Separation of Sub-Cycle Ionization Bursts in Strong-Field Double Ionization of H${}_2$
• Generalized phase-sensitivity of directional bond-breaking in laser-molecule interaction
• Chiral Electron Momentum Distribution upon Strong-Field Ionization of Atoms
• Exploring photoelectron angular distributions emitted from molecular dimers by two delayed intense laser pulses