The alignment-dependent ionization of acetylene and ethylene in short laser pulses is investigated in the framework of the time-dependent density-functional theory coupled with Ehrenfest dynamics. The molecular alignment is found to have a substantial effect on the total ionization. Bond stretching is shown to cause an increase of the ionization efficiency, i.e., enhanced ionization, in qualitative agreement with previous theoretical investigations. It is also demonstrated that the enhanced ionization mechanism greatly enhances the ionization from the inner valence orbitals, and the ionization of the inner orbitals is primarily due to their extended weakly bound density tails.
Time-dependent density functional theory was employed to study the e↵ects of proton and ↵-particle radiation on uracil and adenine. This method has the advantage of treating nuclear motion and electronic motion simultaneously, allowing for the study of electronic excitation, charge transfer, ionization, and nuclear motion. Particle energies were surveyed in the range of 15-500 keV for protons and 100-2000 keV for ↵-particles in conjunction with impact points both on and o↵ carbon bonds in order to investigate the electron and nuclear dynamics of irradiated molecules and the form and quantity of transferred energy. The stopping power, energy transferred, and ionization were found and the relationship between incident particle energy and electron density of to the target molecule was characterized for proton and ↵-particle radiation incident on adenine and uracil.
An accurate method for time propagation of the coupled Maxwell and time-dependent Kohn-Sham (TDKS) equation is presented. The new approach uses a simultaneous fourth-order Runge-Kutta-based propagation of the vector potential and the Kohn-Sham orbitals. The approach is compared to the conventional fourth-order Taylor propagation and predictor-corrector methods. The calculations show several computational and numerical advantages, including higher computational performance, greater stability, better accuracy, and faster convergence.
Time-dependent Density Functional Theory (TDDFT) has become successful for its balance of economy and accuracy. However, the application of TDDFT to large systems or long time scales remains computationally prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we investigate the numerical stability and accuracy of two subspace propagation methods to solve the time-dependent Kohn-Sham equations with finite and periodic boundary conditions. The bases considered are the Lánczos basis and the adiabatic eigenbasis. The results are compared to a benchmark fourth-order Taylor expansion of the time propagator. Our results show that it is possible to use larger time steps with the subspace methods, leading to computational speedups by a factor of 2-3 over Taylor propagation. Accuracy is found to be maintained for certain energy regimes and small time scales.
We present the results of a combined experimental and numerical study on strong-field ionisation of acetylene performed with the aim of identifying the mechanism behind the previously reported surprisingly large multi-electron ionisation probabilities of polyatomic molecules. Using coincidence momentum imaging techniques and time-dependent density functional simulations, we show that the reported efficient ionisation is due to the combined action of a significant geometrically induced energy upshift of the most relevant valence orbitals as the C–H distance stretches beyond about two times the equilibrium distance, and a strong increase in the coupling between multiple molecular orbitals concomitant with this stretch motion. The identified enhanced ionisation mechanism, which we refer to as EIC-MOUSE, is only effective for molecules aligned close to parallel to the laser polarisation direction, and is inhibited for perpendicularly aligned molecules because of a suppression of the C–H stretch motion during the onset of ionisation.
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