ABSTRACT
We theoretically and experimentally investigate the photon momentum transfer in single-photon double ionization of helium at various large photon energies. We find that the forward shifts of the momenta along the light propagation of the two photoelectrons are roughly proportional to their fraction of the excess energy. The mean value of the forward momentum is about 8/5 of the electron energy divided by the speed of light. This holds for fast and slow electrons despite the fact that the energy sharing is highly asymmetric and the slow electron is known to be ejected by secondary processes of shake off and knockout rather than directly taking its energy from the photon. The biggest deviations from this rule are found for the region of equal energy sharing where the quasifree mechanism dominates double ionization.
ABSTRACT
In laser-matter interaction, most previous studies have focused on the change of the electron momentum induced by the external fields. Here, we theoretically investigate the electron displacement induced by an ultrashort pulse, whose precise waveform is hard to determine experimentally. We propose and numerically demonstrate a scheme to accurately measure the electron displacement using a ruler formed by the interfering spirals in the photoelectron momentum distribution generated by two oppositely circularly polarized pulses. The scheme is robust against the focusing volume effects and the jitter of the carrier envelope phase of the two circular pulses. The ability to measure the electron displacement by an arbitrary pulse may pave the way to quantitative control of the charge migration in matter on the scale of Ångström.
ABSTRACT
One of the main goals of strong-field physics is to understand the complex structures formed in the momentum plane of the photoelectron. For this purpose, different semiclassical methods have been developed to seek an intuitive picture of the underlying mechanism. The most popular ones are the quantum trajectory Monte Carlo (QTMC) method and the Coulomb-corrected strong-field approximation (CCSFA), both of which take the classical action into consideration and can describe the interference effect. The CCSFA is more widely applicable in a large range of laser parameters due to its nonadiabatic nature in treating the initial tunneling dynamics. However, the CCSFA is much more time consuming than the QTMC method because of the numerical solution to the saddle-point equations. In the present work, we present a time-sampling method to overcome this disadvantage. Our method is as efficient as the fast QTMC method and as accurate as the original treatment in CCSFA. The performance of our method is verified by comparing the results of these methods with that of the exact solution to the time-dependent Schrödinger equation.
