Multielectron effect in the strong-field ionization of aligned nonpolar molecules

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of multielectron polarization effects on the strong-field ionization of aligned nonpolar molecules, improving agreement with experimental data and clarifying the role of induced dipole potentials in photoelectron distributions.

Contribution

It introduces a multielectron polarization model into the TDSE framework, enhancing the accuracy of ionization yield predictions for nonpolar molecules.

Findings

Better agreement with experimental ionization yields for CO₂ and CS₂.

Multielectron polarization mainly affects short-range interactions, not long-range PMD features.

Induced dipole potential counteracts the external field at short distances.

Abstract

We revisit strong-field ionization of aligned O$_2$, CO$_2$, and CS$_2$ molecules in light of recent advances in the field of strong-field physics, in particular the inclusion of multielectron polarization in the numerical solution of the time-dependent Schr{\"o}dinger equation (TDSE) within the singe-active-electron approximation. Upon inclusion of multielectron polarization and the associated induced dipole potential in the TDSE model, we obtain angular distributions of total ionization yields which are in better agreement with the available experimental results for CO$_2$ and CS$_2$. For the probed molecules, the main effect of the multielectron polarization on the photoelectron momentum distributions (PMDs) is captured by the introduction of a field at short distances that counteracts the applied external field and leads to a vanishing time-dependent interaction within a certain cut-off radius. Hence, for the PMDs we find no imprints of the long-range part of the laser-induced dipole potential.