Coulomb explosion and angular distributions of the fragment ions of highly charged CO in the strong laser field

Abstract

The CO molecular ionization and Coulomb explosion are systematically investigated utilizing a high-resolution time-of-flight mass spectrometer. It is found that the main dissociation channels of highly charged CO, CO, and CO are (2,1), (2,2), and (3,2) respectively, i.e., the charge-symmetric dissociation channel, and their kinetic energy release keep constant with increasing the laser intensity. We obtain the contribution of different molecular states to the dissociation channel by Gaussian fitting the distribution of the channel’s kinetic energy release. With the laser intensity of W/, the angular distributions of CO(=2,3,4), which exhibit high anisotropy, are generated from these different dissociation channels. According to the present theory, we can qualitatively understand that the anisotropy depends on the molecular orbital profile.