Abstract
Experiments on atoms in intense laser pulses and the corresponding exact ab initio solutions of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation (TDSE) yield photoelectron spectra with low-energy features that are not reproduced by the otherwise successful work horse of strong field laser physics: the “strong field approximation” (SFA). In the semiclassical limit, the SFA possesses an appealing interpretation in terms of interfering quantum trajectories. It is shown that a conceptually simple extension towards the inclusion of Coulomb effects yields very good agreement with exact TDSE results. Moreover, the Coulomb quantum orbits allow for a physically intuitive interpretation and detailed analysis of all low-energy features in the semiclassical regime, in particular, the recently discovered “low-energy structure” [C. I. Blaga et al., Nature Phys. 5, 335 (2009) and W. Quan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 093001 (2009)].
- Received 18 August 2010
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.253002
© 2010 The American Physical Society