Two-electron interference in two-photon attosecond double ionization of neon

Published

July 2, 2024

Author(s)

Siddhartha Chattopadhyay, Carlos Marante, Barry I. Schneider, C. William McCurdy, Luca Argenti

Abstract

The pump-probe experiments enabled by X-ray free-electron lasers (XFEL) will allow us to directly observe correlated electronic motion with attosecond time resolution by detecting photoelectron pairs in coincidence. In helium, the transition between the non-sequential and sequential regime in two-photon double ionization (TPDI) is well explained by a virtual-sequential model. Much less is known, however, about the TPDI process in more complex atoms. Recently, we extended the virtual-sequential model to arbitrary light pulses [Chattopadhyay \it et al.,} Phys. Rev. A\bf 108}, 013114 (2023)]. This extension employs multi-channel scattering states for the single ionization of both the neutral and the ionized target, which we initally applied to helium. In the present study, we show that our extended virtual-sequential model reproduces the qualitative features of the angularly integrated observables with available experimental results for neon, a considerably more complex target. We observe an intriguing feature of inverted two-particle interference in the joint energy distribution of $\mathrmNe}$ compared to $\mathrmHe}$. This phenomenon, attributable to the presence of a final doubly ionized state with triplet symmetry coupled to the two photoelectrons, should be observable with current experimental technologies.

Citation

Physical Review A (Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics)

Pub Type

Journals

Keywords

double ionization attosecond spectroscopy time-dependent Schroedinger equation

Citation

Chattopadhyay, S. , marante, C. , Schneider, B. , McCurdy, C. and Argenti, L. (2024), Two-electron interference in two-photon attosecond double ionization of neon, Physical Review A (Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics) (Accessed November 23, 2024)