Photoionization of aligned excited states in neon by attosecond laser pulses

Abstract

We numerically describe the ionization process induced by linearly and circularly polarized extreme ultraviolet (XUV) attosecond laser pulses on an aligned atomic target, specifically the excited state Ne*(1s 22s 22p 5[ P o 2 1 / 2 ]3s[ P o 1 ]). We compute the excited atomic state by applying the time-dependent restricted-active-space self-consistent field method to fully account for the electronic correlation. We find that correlation-assisted ionization channels can dominate channels accessible without correlation. We also observe that the rotation of the photoelectron momentum distribution by circularly polarized laser pulses compared to the case of linear polarization can be explained in terms of differences in accessible ionization channels. This study shows that it is essential to include electron correlation effects to obtain an accurate description of the photoelectron emission dynamics from aligned excited states.