Quantum Interference in Time-Delayed Nonsequential Double Ionization

TL;DR

This paper systematically analyzes quantum interference effects in nonsequential double ionization via RESI, revealing how interference influences electron momentum distributions and can be controlled to produce diverse patterns.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of interference phenomena in RESI, including analytical expressions and control strategies for the resulting electron momentum distributions.

Findings

Interference significantly affects the shape and symmetry of electron momentum distributions.

Two main types of interference are identified: electron indistinguishability and intra-cycle events.

Interference patterns can be controlled by phase and excited-state geometry.

Abstract

We perform a systematic analysis of quantum interference in nonsequential double ionization focusing on the recollision-excitation with subsequent ionization (RESI) mechanism, employing the strong-field approximation (SFA). We find that interference has a major influence on the shape, localization and symmetry of the correlated electron momentum distributions. In particular, the fourfold symmetry with regard to the parallel momentum components observed in previous SFA studies is broken. Two types of interference are observed and thoroughly analyzed, namely that caused by electron indistinguishability and intra-cycle events, and that stemming from different excitation channels. We find that interference is most prominent around the diagonal and anti-diagonal in the parallel-momentum plane and provide fully analytical expressions for most interference patterns encountered. We also show that this interference can be controlled by an appropriate choice of phase and excited-state geometry. This leads a to myriad of shapes for the RESI distributions including correlated, anti-correlated and ring-shaped.