Effect of Time-Dependent Ionization on Propagation of a Few-Cycle Circularly Polarized Laser Pulse in Two-Level Medium

Abstract

Influence of multiphoton ionization on the propagation and spectrum of few-cycle circularly (elliptically) polarized laser pulses in an open two-level medium (two-level plus continuum model) is investigated based on the conventional two-level model proposed by Slavcheva and Hess (Phys. Rev. A 72 (2005) 053804), and the propagation dynamics of an arbitrary elliptically polarized laser pulse is reduced into that of right and left circularly polarized laser pulses. When the laser intensity is high enough to cause ionization, there are significant impacts of ionization on the pulse reshaping and on the higher order spectral components, and the impacts for the open two-level model are different from those for the closed two-level model.