Strong Field Ionization of Water: Nuclear Dynamics Revealed by Varying the Pulse Duration

Abstract

Polyatomic molecules in strong laser fields can undergo substantial nuclear motion within tens of femtoseconds. Ion imaging methods based on dissociation or Coulomb explosion therefore have difficulty faithfully recording the geometry dependence of the field ionization that initiates the dissociation process. Here we compare the strong-field double ionization and subsequent dissociation of water (both H${}_2$O and D${}_2$O) in 10-fs and 40-fs 800-nm laser pulses. We find that 10-fs pulses turn off before substantial internuclear motion occurs, whereas rapid internuclear motion can take place during the double ionization process for 40-fs pulses. The short-pulse measurements are consistent with a simple tunnel ionization picture, whose predictions help interpret the motion observed in the long-pulse measurements.

9 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Coincidence velocity map imaging using Tpx3Cam, a time stamping optical camera with 1.5 ns timing resolution
• Computational studies of x-ray scattering from three-dimensionally-aligned asymmetric-top molecules
• Geometric Dependence of Strong Field Enhanced Ionization in D${}_2$O
• N${}_2^{+}$ Lasing: Gain and Absorption in the Presence of Rotational Coherence
• Orientation Resolution through Rotational Coherence Spectroscopy

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Strong Field Ionization of Water II: Electronic and Nuclear Dynamics En Route to Double Ionization
• Imaging valence electron rearrangement in a chemical reaction using hard X-ray scattering
• Restricted-Geometry Quantum Models Beyond Atoms: Application of the Eckhardt-Sacha approach to NSDI in Diatomic Systems