Frustrated tunneling ionization in the elliptically polarized strong laser fields.

Abstract

We theoretically investigated frustrated tunneling ionization (FTI) in the interaction of atoms with elliptically polarized laser pulses by a semiclassical ensemble model. Our results show that the yield of frustrated tunneling ionization events exhibits an anomalous behavior which maximizes at the nonzero ellipticity. By tracing back the initial tunneling coordinates, we show that this anomalous behavior is due to the fact that the initial transverse velocity at tunneling of the FTI events is nonzero in the linear laser pulses and it moves across zero as the ellipticity increases. The FTI yield maximizes at the ellipticity when the initial transverse momentum for being trapped is zero. Moreover, the angular momentum distribution of the FTI events and its ellipticity dependence are also explored. The anomalous behavior revealed in our work is very similar to the previously observed ellipticity dependence of the near- and below-threshold harmonics, and thus our work may uncover the mechanism of the below-threshold harmonics which is still a controversial issue.