Speaker
Alejandro Saenz
(Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Description
About a decade ago, the so-called lochfrass effect was
predicted that creates a vibrational wavepacket in the non-ionized
neutral molecule upon strong-field ionization. It was shortly thereafter
experimentally observed in molecular deuterium. However, as was pointed
out in those works, the vibrational wavepacket could, in principle,
also be generated by bond softening (the dressed-state description
of stimulated Raman scattering). Using the surprising stability of
the formed wavepacket it was possible to distinguish the two processes
and to confirm lochfrass to be (predominantly) responsible. We have now
revisited the processes in order to investigate the astonishing
robustness of the two effects and why it was possible to distinguish
the two processes by the absolute phase of the wavepacket, despite the
fact that the experiment used laser pulses with no control over the
carrier-envelope phase. The result reveals that a much more general
control mechanism is responsible that is expected to be an extremely
robust and thus useful alternative for the standard generation of
coherent wavepackets using light fields.
Primary author
Alejandro Saenz
(Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
