Energy bunching in soft recollisions revealed with long-wavelength few-cycle pulses

TL;DR

This paper investigates how soft recollisions in laser-driven electron-ion collisions cause energy bunching, leading to peaks in photo-electron spectra, which can be observed experimentally with phase-stabilized few-cycle pulses.

Contribution

It reveals the energy bunching effect due to soft recollisions and proposes an experimental method to observe the resulting spectral peaks.

Findings

Energy bunching causes peaks in photo-electron spectra.

Longer phase-stabilized pulses can uncover these peaks experimentally.

Soft recollisions significantly influence electron energy distributions.

Abstract

Soft recollisions are laser-driven distant collisions of an electron with its parent ion. Such collisions may cause an energy bunching, since electrons with different initial drift momenta can acquire impacts, which exactly counterbalance these differences. The bunching generates a series of peaks in the photo-electron spectrum. We will show that this series could be uncovered peak-by-peak experimentally by means of phase-stabilized few-cycle pulses with increasing duration.