Atomic delay in helium, neon, argon and krypton**Intended contribution to the ‘Special issue on ultrafast electron and molecular dynamics’ available at http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-4075/47/12.

Abstract

Photoionization by an eXtreme UltraViolet (XUV) attosecond pulse train (APT) in the presence of an infrared pulse (RABBITT method) conveys information about the atomic photoionization delay. By taking the difference of the spectral delays between pairs of rare gases (Ar,He), (Kr,He) and (Ne,He) it is possible to eliminate in each case the larger group delay (‘attochirp’) associated with the APT itself and obtain the Ar, Kr and Ne Wigner delays referenced to model calculations of the He delay. In this work we measure how the delays vary as a function of XUV photon energy but we cannot determine the absolute delay difference between atoms due to lack of precise knowledge of the initial conditions. The extracted delays are compared with several theoretical predictions and the results are consistent within 30 as over the energy range from 10 to 50 eV. An ‘effective’ Wigner delay over all emission angles is found to be more consistent with our angle-integrated measurement near the Cooper minimum in Ar. We observe a few irregular features in the delay that may be signatures of resonances.