Impact of the continuum Coulomb interaction in quantum-orbit-based treatments of high-order above-threshold ionization

Abstract

We perform a systematic comparison between photoelectron momentum distributions computed with the rescattered-quantum orbit strong-field approximation (RQSFA) and the Coulomb-quantum orbit strong-field approximation (CQSFA). We exclude direct, hybrid, and multiple scattered CQSFA trajectories, and focus on the contributions of trajectories that undergo a single act of rescattering. For this orbit subset, one may establish a one-to-one correspondence between the RQSFA and CQSFA contributions for backscattered and forward-scattered trajectory pairs. We assess the influence of the Coulomb potential on the ionization and rescattering times of specific trajectory pairs, kinematic constraints determined by rescattering, and quantum interference between specific pairs of trajectories. We analyze how the Coulomb potential alters their ionization and return times, and their interference in photoelectron momentum distributions. We show that Coulomb effects are not significant for high or medium photoelectron energies and shorter orbits, while, for lower momentum ranges or longer electron excursion times in the continuum, the residual Coulomb potential is more important. We also assess the agreement of both theories for different field parameters, and show that it improves with the increase of the wavelength.

18 pages, 10 figures; accepted for publication in Physical Review A

References in corpus (6)

• Strong Field Approximation for Systems with Coulomb Interaction
• Attosecond Field Emission
• Entanglement of Orbital Angular Momentum in Non-Sequential Double Ionization
• Effects of the Coulomb potential in interference patterns of strong-field holography with photoelectrons
• Multiple orbital effects in laser-induced electron diffraction of aligned molecules
• Exploring symmetries in photoelectron holography with two-color linearly polarized fields

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Detangling the quantum tapestry of intra-channel interference in below-threshold nonsequential double ionization with few-cycle laser pulses
• Influence of catastrophes and hidden dynamical symmetries on ultrafast backscattered photoelectrons
• Physics-informed neural networks for solving saddle-point equations in strong-field physics with tailored fields