Title: Strong-field ionization with two-color circularly polarized laser fields

Abstract

Strong-field ionization provides fundamental insight into light-matter interactions, encoding the structure of atoms and molecules on the subångström and subfemtosecond scales. Here, we explore an important regime: strong-field ionization by two-color circularly polarized laser fields. In contrast to past work using linearly polarized drivers, we probe electron trajectories that are driven in a two-dimensional plane, thus separating the tunneling angle from the rescattering angle. This allows us to make several findings. First, we observe a single-lobed electron distribution for co-rotating fields, and a three-lobed distribution for counter-rotating fields, providing experimental validation of the theoretical model explaining the generation of circularly polarized high harmonic light. Second, we discover that there is significant electron-ion rescattering using counter-rotating fields, but not with co-rotating fields. Finally, we show that the rescattered electrons are well separated from the directly ionized electrons, in striking contrast to similar low-energy structures seen with linearly polarized fields. These findings help overcome the long-standing problem of how to decouple the tunneling and rescattering steps in strong-field ionization, which will enable new dynamic probes of atomic and molecular structure.

Authors:

Mancuso, Christopher A. ^[1]; Hickstein, Daniel D. ^[1]; Grychtol, Patrik ^[1]; Knut, Ronny ^[1]; Kfir, Ofer ^[2]; Tong, Xiao-Min ^[3]; Dollar, Franklin ^[1]; Zusin, Dmitriy ^[1]; Gopalakrishnan, Maithreyi ^[1]; Gentry, Christian ^[1]; Turgut, Emrah ^[1]; Ellis, Jennifer L. ^[1]; Chen, Ming-Chang ^[4]; Fleischer, Avner ^[5]; Cohen, Oren ^[2]; Kapteyn, Henry C. ^[1]; Murnane, Margaret M. ^[1]

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+ Show Author Affiliations

1. Univ. of Colorado and NIST, Boulder, CO (United States)
2. Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa (Israel)
3. Univ. of Tsukuba (Japan)
4. National Tsing Hua Univ., Hsinchu (Taiwan)
5. Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa (Israel); Ort Braude College, Karmiel (Israel)

Publication Date:

Wed Mar 25 00:00:00 EDT 2015

Research Org.:

Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO (United States); National Inst. of Standards and Technology (NIST), Boulder, CO (United States)

Sponsoring Org.:

USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES). Chemical Sciences, Geosciences & Biosciences Division; US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR); National Science Foundation (NSF); German Research Foundation (DFG); Swedish Research Council (SRC); e USA-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF); Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)

OSTI Identifier:

1690344

Alternate Identifier(s):

OSTI ID: 1181298

Grant/Contract Number:  

FG02-99ER14982; DGE-1144083; GR-4234/1-1; C24540421

Resource Type:

Accepted Manuscript

Journal Name:

Physical Review A - Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics

Additional Journal Information:

Journal Volume: 91; Journal Issue: 3; Journal ID: ISSN 1050-2947

Publisher:

American Physical Society (APS)

Country of Publication:

United States

Language:

English

Subject:

74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS