• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevA.90.063402
• Corpus ID: 118423153

Ionization and excitation of the excited hydrogen atom in strong circularly polarized laser fields

@article{Bauer2014IonizationAE,
  title={Ionization and excitation of the excited hydrogen atom in strong circularly polarized laser fields},
  author={Jarosław H. Bauer and Francisca Mota-Furtado and P. F. O’Mahony and Bernard Piraux and K. Warda},
  journal={Physical Review A},
  year={2014},
  volume={90},
  pages={063402}
}

• J. Bauer, F. Mota-Furtado, +2 authors K. Warda
• Published 1 December 2014
• Physics
• Physical Review A

In the recent work of Herath et al. [T. Herath, L. Yan, S. K. Lee, and W. Li, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 043004 (2012)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.109.043004] the first experimental observation of a dependence of strong-field ionization rate on the sign of the magnetic quantum number m [of the initial bound state (n,l,m)] was reported. The experiment with nearly circularly polarized light could not distinguish which sign of m favors faster ionization. We perform ab initio calculations for the hydrogen atom initially in one of the four bound substates with the principal quantum number n=2, and irradiated by a short circularly polarized laser pulse of 800nm. In the intensity range of 1012-1013W/cm2 excited bound states play a very important role, but also up to some 1015W/cm2 they cannot be neglected in a full description of the laser-atom interaction. We explore the region that with increasing intensity switches from multiphoton to over-the-barrier ionization and we find, unlike in tunneling-type theories, that the ratio of ionization rates for electrons initially counter-rotating and corotating (with respect to the laser field) may be higher or lower than 1.