Dissociation of Laser-Induced Highly-Excited CO+ 2

Abstract

Laser-induced electron excitation is a general process in strong laser field interactions with atoms and molecules. Previous studies revealed that up to 10% released electrons can be populated into high-lying excited states through electron trapping by the Coulomb potential of their parent ions [1,2]. In case of dissociative double ionization of molecules, one of the two liberated electrons may be trapped and localized to one of the ionic fragments. This process is referred as dissociative frustrated double ionization. So far, researches about dissociative frustrated double ionization mainly focused on homonuclear diatomic molecules, such as H 2 , D 2 and Ar 2 [3–5]. In this work, we investigate electron dynamics in dissociative frustrated double ionization of CO 2 . The non-symmetry two-body dissociation of CO 2 allows us to study not only the electron trapping process itself but also electron localization to different ionic fragments and the importance of such electron dynamics to laser-induced molecular dissociation.