Complete retrieval of attosecond photoelectron dynamics from partially-coherent states in entangled photoemission

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to fully retrieve electron-ion entangled photoemission dynamics from photoelectron spectral data alone, enabling insights into decoherence and entanglement at attosecond timescales.

Contribution

The authors develop an energy-time analysis of the photoelectron's reduced density matrix that allows complete retrieval of photoemission dynamics without ion information.

Findings

Method successfully retrieves dynamics from spectral measurements.

Applicable to experimental schemes measuring reduced density matrices.

Enables study of decoherence and entanglement at attosecond scale.

Abstract

We show that the complete photoemission dynamics in situations of electron-ion entanglement can be retrieved from photoelectron spectral measurements without information on the ion. To this end, we develop an energy-time analysis of the photoelectron's reduced density matrix based on first principles. We test and assess our approach with numerical simulations on a low dimensional model molecule in interaction with broadband composite pulses occulting the vibrational resolution. Our method is directly applicable to recent experimental schemes measuring the photoelectron reduced density matrices in atomic and molecular photoemission. Therefore, it opens a new window on the dynamics of decoherence and entanglement at the attosecond timescale.