Tunneling and other modes of atomic ionization in the presence of strong few-cycle laser pulses and generation of attosecond pulses

Abstract

Numerical integration of the nonstationary Schrödinger equation describing the dynamics of a quantum system in the presence of the electromagnetic wave field is employed to study atomic hydrogen ionization in the presence of an ultrashort laser pulse. It is demonstrated that, in the nonadiabatic mode, in the presence of a pulse with a duration of one or two optical cycles, the ionization probability is anomalously high in comparison with predictions based on the Keldysh ionization theory and various modifications of this theory. It is shown that the nonadiabatic and multiphoton modes of the atomic ionization in the presence of ultrashort laser pulses are superior to the low-frequency adiabatic mode in the effective generation of attosecond XUV pulses.