Abstract
A new analysis shows how to measure the density matrix of an ionized electron to reconstruct its wave packet and identify sources of quantum decoherence.
Highlights
Physical objects with a wavelike behavior are often represented mathematically as the combination of an amplitude and a phase
The emitted EWP can be described by a density matrix ρ representing the ensemble of released single-electron wave packets
After sufficient propagation, the single-electron wave packets spread in time, as their different kinetic energy components do not travel at the same velocity
Summary
Physical objects with a wavelike behavior (a classical electric field, a quantum wave function, etc.) are often represented mathematically as the combination of an amplitude and a phase. Coupling or shot-to-shot fluctuations, photoelectrons can undergo inelastic scattering on neighboring particles during photoionization [21,22], the detector’s response may alter the data by filtering out details in the spectrum, etc In all these cases, the obtained photoelectron spectrum can be explained only if the EWP is described as a statistical ensemble associated to a density matrix. In the context of laser-dressed photoionization, Mixed FROG gives access to the full quantum state of the released EWP, represented by its density matrix or by its Wigner quasiprobability distribution Reconstructing this quantum state makes it possible to decipher the quantum phenomena that unavoidably affect the EWP, such as state superpositions and decoherence, which have been overlooked until now in attosecond metrology. This work deepens our understanding of laser-dressed photoionization, opening new prospects for attosecond photoemission spectroscopy
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