Localizing high-lying Rydberg wave packets with two-color laser fields

Larimian, Seyedreza; Lemell, C.; Stummer, Vinzenz; Geng, Jie; Roither, Stefan; Kartashov, Daniil; Zhang, Li; Wang, Mu-Xue; Gong, Qihuang; Peng, Liang-You; Yoshida, Shuhei; Burgdörfer, Joachim; Baltuška, Andrius; Kitzler, Markus; Xie, Xinhua

doi:10.1103/physreva.96.021403

Cited by 28 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…More details on the experimental setup can be found in our previous publications [10,22,23].Previously, we developed a method to characterize Rydberg states in atoms and molecules formed during strong field interaction. This method employs coincidence detection of Rydberg electrons released by tunnel ionization in the spectrometer dc field and single photon ionization by blackbody radiation (BBR) [10,11]. During the strong field interaction, one electron (e1) is removed through strong field ionization and a second electron ((e2)) is trapped in high-lying Rydberg states to form Ar + * .…”

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confidence: 99%

Frustrated double ionization of argon atoms in strong laser fields

Larimian

Erattupuzha

Baltuška

et al. 2020

Phys. Rev. Research

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We demonstrate kinematically complete measurements on frustrated double ionization of argon atoms in strong laser fields with a reaction microscope. We found that the electron trapping probability after strong field double ionization is much higher than that after strong field single ionization, especially in case of high laser intensity. The retrieved electron momentum distributions of frustrated double ionization show a clear transition from the nonsequential to the sequential regime, similar to those of strong field double ionization. The dependence of electron momentum width on the laser intensity further indicates that the second released electron has a dominant contribution to frustrated double ionization in the sequential regime. PACS numbers: 33.80.Rv, 42.50.Hz, 82.50.Nd When an atom or a molecule is exposed to a strong laser field it may become singly or multiply ionized [1,2]. After the strong field interaction, a fraction of the ionized electron wave packets with near-zero kinetic energies can be trapped into high-lying Rydberg states, a process also known as frustrated field ionization [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. Frustrated double ionization (electron trapping after double ionization) has been experimentally studied for small molecules, including H 2 and argon dimers, using Coulomb explosion imaging [4][5][6][12][13][14] and theoretically using the classical trajectory Monte Carlo method [15,16]. In these experiments the trapping process is identified by the kinetic energy released (KER) during the Coulomb explosion of the molecules. Since an electron trapped in high-lying Rydberg states does not fully shield the nuclear charge, the KER for a molecule with an electron in Rydberg states is higher than that for a nonexcited molecule. Since this method is based on the measurement of KER from molecules undergoing Coulomb explosion, it is applicable to neither atomic targets nor molecules that do not fragment.In this paper, using an alternative method developed in our previous work [10], we report on kinematically complete experiments of electron trapping processes during strong field double ionization of argon atoms. Strong field double ionization may happen sequentially, where the two electrons are removed one after another by the laser field, or non-sequentially, where the second electron is released during the recollision of the first electron with the parent ion [17][18][19]. We show that the trapping probability is strongly enhanced in the sequential ionization regime. Based on our experimental data we explain the electron dynamics underlying these observations.In our experiments we employed a reaction microscope [20,21] for three-body coincidence detection of two electrons and their parent ion created during the interaction of argon atoms with strong laser pulses ( Fig. 1(a)). Laser pulses linearly polarized along the spectrometer axis (z-direction) were provided by a home-built Titanium:sapphire laser amplifier system. The pulses had a center wavelength of 790 nm, a pulse duration of 25 fs an...

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confidence: 99%

Frustrated double ionization of argon atoms in strong laser fields

Larimian

Erattupuzha

Baltuška

et al. 2020

Phys. Rev. Research

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“…When exposed to strong laser fields, a wealth of fascinating phenomena are manifested in molecules such as the bond softening and hardening [1][2][3][4], the abovethreshold dissociation [5,6], the Coulomb explosion [7][8][9], the directional bond breaking [10][11][12][13][14][15], and the chargeresonance-enhanced ionization (CREI) [16][17][18][19]. Besides the ionization, there is a certain probability for the neutral atoms to survive in strong laser fields [20,21], where the detached slow electrons would be eventually recaptured into Rydberg orbitals [22,23]. The Rydberg excitation plays important roles in the acceleration of neutral atoms [24], the formation of low-energy structures of photoelectrons [25][26][27], and the near-threshold harmonics generation [28].…”

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Visualizing and Steering Dissociative Frustrated Double Ionization of Hydrogen Molecules

Zhang

Gong

et al. 2017

Phys. Rev. Lett.

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We experimentally visualize the dissociative frustrated double ionization of hydrogen molecules by using few-cycle laser pulses in a pump-probe scheme, in which process the tunneling ionized electron is recaptured by one of the outgoing nuclei of the breaking molecule. Three internuclear distances are recognized to enhance the dissociative frustrated double ionization of molecules at different instants after the first ionization step. The recapture of the electron can be further steered to one of the outgoing nuclei as desired by using phase-controlled two-color laser pulses. Both the experimental measurements and numerical simulations suggest that the Rydberg atom is favored to emit to the direction of the maximum of the asymmetric optical field. Our results on the one hand intuitively visualize the dissociative frustrated double ionization of molecules, and on the other hand open the possibility to selectively excite the heavy fragment ejected from a molecule.

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“…During the flight of the excited ion (Ar +* ) to the detector, the spectrometer field (with strength of a few V/cm, which is applied to guide the charged particles to the detectors) or black-body radiation (BBR) further ionizes the highly excited ion and the Rydberg electron is detached. In recent studies, we demonstrated the coincidence detection of Rydberg electrons with ionization induced by the spectrometer field and BBR in the case of single ionization [6,7]. The experimental setup and the correlated signals of Rydberg electrons with their parent ions (Ar 2+ ), which are represented as a long parabolic curve in the photo-electron-photo-ion coincidence (PEPICO) distribution, are shown in Fig.…”

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confidence: 99%