Attosecond streaking of molecules in the low-energy region studied by a wavefunction splitting scheme

Abstract

We present a theoretical study of the low-energy photoelectron spectra of hydrogen molecular ion generated by a single attosecond pulse in the presence of an infrared (IR) laser field. In order to investigate this type of attosecond streaking of molecules, we developed a very efficient grid-based numerical method to solve the two-centre time-dependent Schrödinger equation (TDSE) in the prolate spheroidal coordinates. Specifically, the radial coordinate is discretized with the finite-element discrete variable representation (FE-DVR) for easy parallel computation and the angular coordinate with the usual DVR. A wavefunction splitting scheme is utilized to reduce the demanding requirement of the computational resource to solve the corresponding TDSE when an IR field is present. After verification of the accuracy and efficiency of our method, we then apply it to investigate the attosecond streaking spectra of H+2 in the low-energy region. In contrast to the usual attosecond streaking in the high-energy region, part of the low-energy electrons may be driven back to rescatter with the residual two-centre core. Very interesting interference structures are present in the low-energy region. When the internuclear distance is small, they are very similar to what we have recently observed in the atomic case.