Ionization and dissociation dynamics of molecules in strong laser fields.

摘要

The fast advancement of ultrashort-pulsed high-intensity laser technology allows for generating an electric field equivalent to the Coulomb field inside an atom or a molecule (e.g., EC=5.14x109 V/cm at the 1s orbit radius a0=0.0529 nm of the hydrogen atom, which corresponds to an intensity of 3.54x1016 W/cm2). Atoms and molecules exposed in such a field will easily be ionized, as the external field is strong enough to remove the electrons from the core. This is usually referred to "strong field". Strong fields provide a new tool for studying the interaction of atoms and molecules with light in the nonlinear nonperturbative regime. During the past three decades, significant progress has been made in the strong field science.;Today, most phenomena involving atoms in strong fields have been relatively well understood by the single-active-electron (SAE) approximation. However, the interpretation of these responses in molecules has encountered great difficulties. Not like atoms that only undergo excitation and ionization, various dissociation channels accompanying excitation and ionization can occur in molecules during the laser pulse interaction, which imparts further complexity to the study of molecules in strong fields. Previous studies have shown that molecules can behave significantly different from rare gas atoms in phenomena as simple as single and double ionization. Molecular dissociation following ionization also presents challenges in strong fields compared to what we have learned in the weak-field regime.;This dissertation focuses on experimental studies on ionization and dissociation of some commonly-seen small molecules in strong laser fields. Previous work of molecules in strong fields will be briefly reviewed, particularly on some open questions about multiple dissociation channels, nonsequential double ionization, enhanced ionization and molecular alignment. The identification of various molecular dissociation channels by recent experimental technical upgrades will be shown. The study of enhanced ionization in small molecules by time-resolved pump-probe experiments and varying-pulse duration experiments will be discussed, followed by an investigation of molecular alignment effect in sequential and nonsequential dynamics. At last, selective charge separation in charge asymmetric dissociation of heteronuclear diatomic molecules will be shown and conclusion and future work will be discussed.