Intra- and intercycle interference of angle-resolved electron emission in laser-assisted XUV atomic ionization

Abstract

A theoretical study of ionization of the hydrogen atom due to an XUV pulse in the presence of an infrared (IR) laser is presented. Well-established theories are usually used to describe the laser-assisted photoelectron effect: the well-known soft-photon approximation firstly posed by Maquet et al (2007 J. Mod. Opt. 54 1847) and Kazansky’s theory in (2010 Phys. Rev. A 82, 033420). However, these theories completely fail to predict the electron emission perpendicularly to the polarization direction. Making use of a semiclassical model (SCM), we study the angle-resolved energy distribution of PEs for the case that both fields are linearly polarized in the same direction. We thoroughly analyze and characterize two different emission regions in the angle-energy domain: (i) the parallel-like region with contribution of two classical trajectories per optical cycle and (ii) the perpendicular-like region with contribution of four classical trajectories per optical cycle. We show that our SCM is able to assess the interference patterns of the angle-resolved PE spectrum in the two different mentioned regions. Electron trajectories stemming from different optical laser cycles give rise to angle-independent intercycle interferences known as sidebands. These sidebands are modulated by an angle-dependent coarse-grained structure coming from the intracycle interference of the electron trajectories born during the same optical cycle. We show the accuracy of our SCM as a function of the time delay between the IR and the XUV pulses and also as a function of the laser intensity by comparing the semiclassical predictions of the angle-resolved PE spectrum with the continuum-distorted wave strong field approximation and the ab initio solution of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation.