22 August 2011 to 16 September 2011
Europe/Stockholm timezone

Talk by Ingo Barth: Non-adiabatic ionization in circularly polarized laser fields

7 Sept 2011, 10:00
1h

Description

Motivated by the recent experimental work of Goulielmakis et al. on real-time observation of electron motion in the valence 4p shell of krypton atoms [1], we will present the theory for the ionization of arbitrary states of atoms in strong circularly polarized laser fields. It is commonly assumed that strong-field ionization in low-frequency laser field is an adiabatic process. Therefore, one does not expect to generate electronic ring currents in ions during ionization in the low-frequency fields. To check this assumption, we revisit the theory of strong-field ionization developed by Perelomov, Popov, and Terent’ev (PPT) [2,3]. The original PPT theory includes explicit results for ionization of s-orbitals by circularly or in general elliptically polarized laser fields. We extend the PPT approach to p0, p+ and p- orbitals of atoms in circularly polarized field. This allows us to address the question on the asymmetry in ionizing the ring-current carrying p+ and p- orbitals by the right (or left) circular polarization, thus characterizing the currents that can be induced by non-adiabatic ionization. [1] E. Goulielmakis, Z.-H. Loh, A. Wirth, R. Santra, N. Rohringer, V. S. Yakovlev, S. Zherebtsov, T. Pfeifer, A. M. Azzeer, M. F. Kling, S. R. Leone, F. Krausz, Real-time observation on valence electron motion, Nature 466, 739 (2010) [2] A. M. Perelomov, V. S. Popov, M. V. Terent’ev, Ionization of atoms in an alternating electric field, Soviet Physics JETP 23, 924 (1966)

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