Experimental verification of the nonadiabatic effect in strong-field ionization with elliptical polarization

Abstract

We perform high-resolution measurement of ellipticity-resolved momentum distributions from tunneling ionization of atoms along the major and minor axes in strong elliptically polarized fields, respectively. With developing a subcycle nonadiabatic strong-field tunneling theory for arbitrary laser polarization, we show that the electron initial conditions for positions and momenta after the tunneling are nonadiabatically intertwined with the instantaneous laser field. We extract the transverse and longitudinal momentum distributions at the tunnel exit with respect to the field ellipticity. We calibrate the laser intensity with ab initio calculation by solving the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation. The nonadiabatic effects are confirmed experimentally and theoretically. Disentangling the effect of the long-range Coulomb potential from the laser field, we have further demonstrated that the momentum-time structure of the tunneling wave packet in strong laser fields can be approximatively imaged when treating the Coulomb effect perturbatively.