Abstract
We theoretically explore the use of UV pump – UV probe schemes to resolve in time the dynamics of nuclear wave packets in excited electronic states of the hydrogen molecule. The pump pulse ignites the dynamics in singly excited states, that will be probed after a given time delay by a second identical pulse that will ionize the molecule. The field-free molecular dynamics is first explored by analyizing the autocorrelation function for the pumped wave packet and the excitation probabilities. We investigate both energy and angle differential ionization probabilities and demonstrate that the asymmetry induced in the electron angular distributions gives a direct map of the time evolution of the pumped wave packet.
Highlights
The new generation of laser sources using high-harmonic generation (HHG) techniques [1, 2, 3]and free electron lasers (FEL and X-FEL) [4, 5, 6] nowadays provide intense ultrashort pulses with wavelengths within the UV and XUV energy regions such that one or few-photon absorption promotes electrons into excited states or into the ionization continua of atoms and molecules
We propose a similar scheme, but instead of probing the single ionization channels we will use them as the signal to probe singly excited states of the neutral molecule
We aim to investigate the dynamics associated to excited states of H2 in a UV-pump/UV-probe scheme by analyzing the ionization probabilities
Summary
Free electron lasers (FEL and X-FEL) [4, 5, 6] nowadays provide intense ultrashort pulses with wavelengths within the UV and XUV energy regions such that one or few-photon absorption promotes electrons into excited states or into the ionization continua of atoms and molecules The availability of these pulses with durations of the order of a few femtoseconds (1 fs = 10−15 s) and even tens of attoseconds (1 as = 10−18 s) makes possible to explore the molecular dynamics associated to excited/ionized targets at the time scales at which electrons and fast nuclei move [7, 8, 9].
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