Carrier-envelope phase control of electron motion in laser-driven H₃²⁺

Abstract

The triatomic molecular ion H32+ exposed to a few-cycle, circularly polarized laser pulse is studied. The model employed includes three electronic states and three degrees of freedom for the nuclear wave function, thereby enabling the three protons to form a general triangle. We show that by varying the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of the laser pulse, we can select the proton to which the electron finally binds after the dissociation is completed. Analysis of the time-dependent wave function reveals that the molecular shape remains close to an equilateral triangle during the laser pulse, and that the results of the three-dimensional (3D) simulations can be interpreted with an effective one-dimensional (1D) model.

Using the carrier-envelope phase to control strong-field dissociation of HeH+ at midinfrared wavelengths

“…Similar studies on CO have predicted that two-color pulses can be used to control molecular orientation [4,12,13]. These theoretical predictions have been realized in experiments starting from the neutral targets H 2 [14][15][16][17][18], D 2 [13,15,[18][19][20][21][22], HD [19,23], CO [4,13,[24][25][26], DCl [27,28], and small polyatomic molecules [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. More recently, experimental CEP control has been demonstrated directly on H + 2 [38][39][40].…”