Glory interference spectroscopy in Sr atom

Abstract

Slow (meV) photoelectron imaging spectroscopy is employed in the experimental study of near-threshold photoionization of strontium atoms in the presence of an external static electric field. Specifically, the study is devoted to the glory effect, that is, the appearance of an intense peak at the center of the recorded photoelectron images, when dealing with m= 0 final ionized Stark states (m denoting the magnetic quantum number). This critical effect is formally identical to that encountered in classical scattering theory, where, for a nonzero value of the impact parameter, the zero-crossing of the deflection function leads to a divergent classical differential cross section. By recording the magnitude variation of this glory peak as a function of electron excitation energy, we observe that, besides the traces of classical origin, it also exhibits intense quantum interference and beating phenomena, above and below the zero-static-field ionization threshold. We study both, single- and two-photon ionization of Sr, thus enabling a comparison not only between the different excitation schemes, but also with an earlier work devoted to two-photon ionization of Mg atom by Kalaitzis et al (2020 Phys. Rev. A 102 033101). Our recordings are analyzed within the framework of the Harmin–Fano frame transformation Stark effect theory that is applied to both the hydrogen atom and a non-hydrogenic one simulating Sr. We discuss the various aspects of the recorded and calculated glory interference and beating structures and their ‘short time Fourier transforms’ and classify them as either atom-specific or atom independent. In particular, we verify the ‘universal’ connection between the glory oscillations above the zero-field threshold and the differences between the origin-to-detector times of flight corresponding to pairs of classical electron trajectories that end up to the image center.