Harnessing Time Symmetry to Fundamentally Alter Entanglement in Photoionization

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how exploiting time symmetry can fundamentally change entanglement in photoionization, enabling the detection of entanglement through channel-resolved photoelectron distributions correlated with the ion's internal state.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using time symmetry parity to alter and detect entanglement in photoionization, which was previously unobservable with standard methods.

Findings

Time symmetry parity fundamentally alters entanglement in photoionization.

Channel-resolved photoelectron distributions can be correlated with ion states.

First demonstration of using time symmetry parity in strong-field interactions.

Abstract

The Grobe--Eberly doublet phenomenon occurs in photoelectron distributions when a field dresses the remaining ion. Its manifestation is due to entanglement between a free electron and a hybrid state of light and matter. Direct detection of such entanglement is however not possible by coincidence schemes due to the dressing mechanism having an inconspicuous phase correlation effect on the ion. Here, it is shown that odd envelopes fundamentally alter the entanglement, such that channel-resolved photoelectron distributions become identifiable in coincidence with the internal state of the field-free ion. This constitutes a first usage of the parity of time symmetry in strong-field interactions.