Non-constant ponderomotive energy in above threshold ionization by intense short laser pulses

Abstract

We analyze the contribution of the quiver kinetic energy acquired by an electron in an oscillating electric field to the energy balance in atomic ionization processes by a short laser pulse. Due to the time dependence of this additional kinetic energy, a temporal average is assumed to maintain a stationary energy conservation rule. This rule is used to predict the position of the peaks observed in the photo electron spectra (PE). For a flat top pulse envelope, the mean value of the quiver energy over the whole pulse leads to the concept of ponderomotive energy $U_{p}$. However for a short pulse with a fast changing field intensity a stationarity approximation could not be precise. We check these concepts by studying first the photoelectron (PE) spectrum within the Semiclassical Model (SCM) for a multiple steps pulses. The SCM offers the possibility to establish a connection between emission times and the PE spectrum in the energy domain. We show that PE substructures stem from ionization at different times mapping the pulse envelope. We also present the analysis of the PE spectrum for a realistic sine-squared envelope within the Coulomb-Volkov and \textit{ab initio} calculations solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. We found that the electron emission amplitudes produced at different times interfere with each other and produce a new additional pattern, that overlap the above-threshold ionization (ATI) peaks.