Photoelectron combs in ionization: Influence of rescattering and nondipole effects

TL;DR

This paper investigates how rescattering and nondipole effects influence photoelectron comb structures during ionization by extreme ultraviolet pulses, revealing shifts, substructures, and coherence loss through exact numerical solutions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis beyond the first-order nondipole approximation by solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation exactly, including atomic potential effects.

Findings

Photoelectron comb peaks are shifted depending on emission angle.

Discrepancies increase with laser field strength when compared to first-order approximations.

Rescattering causes loss of coherence in comb structures over multiple pulses.

Abstract

Ionization by a sequence of extreme ultraviolet pulses is investigated based on the rigorous numerical solution of the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation, when the driving laser field is treated exactly. This goes beyond the typically used first-order nondipole approximation and reveals the effects of radiation pressure to its full extent. Specifically, we observe the comb structures in both the momentum and the energy distributions of photoelectrons. The comb peaks are shifted, however, depending on the emission angle of electrons. While similar effect is observed already in the first-order nondipole approximation, with increasing the laser field strength the discrepancy with our exact results becomes more pronounced. Also, we observe the additional substructure of the comb peaks arising in the angle-integrated energy distributions of photoelectrons. Finally, as our numerical calculations account for the atomic potential in the entire interaction region, we observe the loss of coherence of comb structures with increasing the number of laser pulses, that we attribute to rescattering.