Holographic detection of parity in atomic and molecular orbitals

Abstract

We introduce a novel and concise methodology to detect the parity of atomic and molecular orbitals based on photoelectron holography, which is more general than the existing schemes. It fully accounts for the Coulomb distortions of electron trajectories, does not require sculpted fields to retrieve phase information and, in principle, is applicable to a broad range of electron momenta. By comparatively measuring the differential photoelectron spectra from strong-field ionization of N${}_2$ molecules and their companion atoms of Ar, some photoelectron holography patterns are found to be dephased for both targets. This is well reproduced by the full-dimensional time-dependent Schrödinger equation and the Coulomb quantum-orbit strong-field approximation (CQSFA) simulation. Using the CQSFA, we trace back our observations to different parities of the 3$p$ orbital of Ar and the highest-occupied molecular orbital of N${}_2$ via interfering Coulomb-distorted quantum orbits carrying different initial phases. This method could in principle be used to extract bound-state phases from any holographic structure, with a wide range of potential applications in recollision physics and spectroscopy.

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Spiral-like Holographic Structures: Unwinding Interference Carpets of Coulomb-Distorted Orbits in Strong-Field Ionization
• Dissecting Sub-Cycle Interference in Photoelectron Holography
• Impact of the continuum Coulomb interaction in quantum-orbit-based treatments of high-order above-threshold ionization
• Quantum interference and imaging using intense laser fields
• Exploring symmetries in photoelectron holography with two-color linearly polarized fields
• Angular dependence of the Wigner time delay upon strong field ionization from an aligned p-orbital
• Semiclassical Trajectory Perspective of Glory Rescattering in Strong-field Photoelectron Holography
• Strong-Field Photoelectron Interferometry with Near-Single-Cycle Yb Lasers
• Femtosecond pulse parameter estimation from photoelectron momenta using machine learning