Laser-Induced Inelastic Diffraction from Strong-Field Double Ionization.

Abstract

In this Letter, we propose a novel laser-induced inelastic diffraction (LIID) scheme based on the intense-field-driven atomic nonsequential double ionization (NSDI) process and demonstrate that, with this LIID approach, the doubly differential cross sections (DDCSs) of the target ions, e.g., Ar^{+} and Xe^{+}, can be accurately extracted from the two-dimensional photoelectron momentum distributions in the NSDI process of the corresponding atoms. The extracted DDCSs exhibit a strong dependence on both the target and the laser intensity, in good agreement with calculated DDCSs from the scattering of free electrons. The LIID scheme may be extended to molecular systems and provides a promising approach for imaging of the gas-phase molecular dynamics induced by a strong laser field with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution.