Detecting and Characterizing the Nonadiabaticity of Laser-Induced Quantum Tunneling

Kunlong Liu, Siqiang Luo, Min Li, Yang Li, Yudi Feng, Baojie Du, Yueming Zhou, Peixiang Lu, and Ingo Barth
Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 053202 – Published 8 February 2019
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Abstract

The nonadiabaticity of quantum tunneling through an evolving barrier is relevant to resolving laser-driven dynamics of atoms and molecules at an attosecond timescale. Here, we propose and demonstrate a novel scheme to detect the nonadiabatic behavior of tunnel ionization studied in an attoclock configuration, without counting on the laser intensity calibration or the modeling of the Coulomb effect. In our scheme, the degree of nonadiabaticity for tunneling scenarios in elliptically polarized laser fields can be steered continuously simply with the pulse ellipticity, while the critical instantaneous vector potentials remain identical. We observe the characteristic feature of the measured photoelectron momentum distributions, which matches the distinctive prediction of nonadiabatic theories. In particular, our experiments demonstrate that the nonadiabatic initial transverse momentum at the tunnel exit is approximately proportional to the instantaneous effective Keldysh parameters in the tunneling regime, as predicted theoretically by Ohmi, Tolstikhin, and Morishita [Phys. Rev. A 92, 043402 (2015)]. Our study clarifies a long-standing controversy over the validation of the adiabatic approximation and will substantially advance studies of laser-induced ultrafast dynamics in experiments.

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  • Received 27 August 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.053202

© 2019 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Atomic, Molecular & Optical

Authors & Affiliations

Kunlong Liu1,2, Siqiang Luo1, Min Li1,*, Yang Li1, Yudi Feng1, Baojie Du1, Yueming Zhou1, Peixiang Lu1,3,†, and Ingo Barth2,‡

  • 1Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics and School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China
  • 2Max-Planck-Institut für Mikrostrukturphysik, Weinberg 2, 06120 Halle (Saale), Germany
  • 3Hubei Key Laboratory of Optical Information and Pattern Recognition, Wuhan Institute of Technology, Wuhan 430205, China

  • *mli@hust.edu.cn
  • lupeixiang@hust.edu.cn
  • barth@mpi-halle.mpg.de

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Issue

Vol. 122, Iss. 5 — 8 February 2019

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