• Rapid Communication

Strong-field ionization with two-color circularly polarized laser fields

Christopher A. Mancuso, Daniel D. Hickstein, Patrik Grychtol, Ronny Knut, Ofer Kfir, Xiao-Min Tong, Franklin Dollar, Dmitriy Zusin, Maithreyi Gopalakrishnan, Christian Gentry, Emrah Turgut, Jennifer L. Ellis, Ming-Chang Chen, Avner Fleischer, Oren Cohen, Henry C. Kapteyn, and Margaret M. Murnane
Phys. Rev. A 91, 031402(R) – Published 25 March 2015
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Abstract

Strong-field ionization provides fundamental insight into light-matter interactions, encoding the structure of atoms and molecules on the subångström and subfemtosecond scales. In this Rapid Communication, we explore an important regime: strong-field ionization by two-color circularly polarized laser fields. In contrast to past work using linearly polarized drivers, we probe electron trajectories that are driven in a two-dimensional plane, thus separating the tunneling angle from the rescattering angle. This allows us to make several findings. First, we observe a single-lobed electron distribution for co-rotating fields, and a three-lobed distribution for counter-rotating fields, providing experimental validation of the theoretical model explaining the generation of circularly polarized high harmonic light. Second, we discover that there is significant electron-ion rescattering using counter-rotating fields, but not with co-rotating fields. Finally, we show that the rescattered electrons are well separated from the directly ionized electrons, in striking contrast to similar low-energy structures seen with linearly polarized fields. These findings help overcome the long-standing problem of how to decouple the tunneling and rescattering steps in strong-field ionization, which will enable new dynamic probes of atomic and molecular structure.

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  • Received 21 November 2014
  • Revised 21 January 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.91.031402

©2015 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Christopher A. Mancuso1, Daniel D. Hickstein1,*, Patrik Grychtol1, Ronny Knut1, Ofer Kfir2, Xiao-Min Tong3, Franklin Dollar1, Dmitriy Zusin1, Maithreyi Gopalakrishnan1, Christian Gentry1, Emrah Turgut1, Jennifer L. Ellis1, Ming-Chang Chen4, Avner Fleischer2,5, Oren Cohen2, Henry C. Kapteyn1, and Margaret M. Murnane1

  • 1JILA and Department of Physics, University of Colorado Boulder and NIST, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA
  • 2Solid State Institute and Physics Department, Technion, Haifa, 32000, Israel
  • 3Division of Material Science, Faculty of Pure and Applied Science, University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8573, Japan
  • 4Institute of Photonics Technologies, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan
  • 5Department of Physics and Optical Engineering, Ort Braude College, Karmiel 21982, Israel

  • *Corresponding author: danhickstein@gmail.com

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Issue

Vol. 91, Iss. 3 — March 2015

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