Numerical time-of-flight analysis of the strong-field photoeffect

TL;DR

This paper introduces a short-time filtering method for analyzing the photoionization amplitude from TDSE solutions, enabling pathway identification and interference suppression in strong-field photoelectron spectra.

Contribution

It presents a novel filtering technique that overcomes the black-box limitation of TDSE solvers, facilitating pathway analysis and comparison with semi-classical models.

Findings

Identifies dominant ionization pathways in strong fields.

Suppresses intercycle quantum interference effects.

Enhances understanding of photoelectron spectrum formation.

Abstract

Short-time filtering of the photoionization amplitude extracted straight from the numerical solution of the time-dependent Schr\"{o}dinger equation (TDSE) is used to identify dominant pathways that form photoelectron spectra in strong fields. Thereby, the "black-box nature" of TDSE solvers only giving the final spectrum is overcome, and simpler approaches, e.g., semi-classical based on the strong-field approximation, can be tested and improved. The approach also allows to suppress intercycle quantum interference between pathways removing patterns that are usually washed out in experiments.