Double Ionization Dynamics of Molecular Hydrogen in Ultrashort Intense Laser Fields**Supported by the National Basic Research Program of China under Grant No 2013CB922201, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos 11304365, 11374329 and 11334009.

Abstract

We experimentally investigate the double ionization of molecular hydrogen subjected to ultrashort intense laser pulses. The total kinetic energy release of the two coincident H+ ions, which provides a diagnosis of different processes to double ionization of H2, is measured for two different pulse durations, i.e., 25 and 5 fs, and various laser intensities. It is found that, for the long pulse duration (i.e., 25 fs), the double ionization occurs mainly via two processes, i.e., the charge resonance enhanced ionization and recollision-induced double ionization. Moreover, the contributions from these two processes can be significantly modulated by changing the laser intensity. In contrast, for a few-cycle pulse of 5 fs, only the recollsion-induced double ionization survives, and in particular, this process could be solely induced by the first-return recollision at appropriate laser intensities, providing an efficient way to probe the sub-laser-cycle molecular dynamics.