Time delay in nonadiabatic tunneling ionization

Abstract

The under-the-barrier recollision pathway during the tunneling ionization of an atom, despite its minuscule amplitude, leaves its signature on the observable photoelectron momentum distribution due to a phase shift relative to the direct ionization path, that can be interpreted as a tunneling time delay. We investigate how this time delay is modified in the nonadiabatic regime, where the tunneling barrier evolves dynamically during the ionization process. Our analysis is based on a simple model of a one-dimensional short-range potential driven by a strong laser pulse which remains amenable to a systematic analytical treatment with the strong field approximation (SFA). We show a significant contribution of the high-order SFA corrections, which describes the recollision channel with recombination and further ionization, and is additional to the rescattering. Whereas the recombination channel dominates over the rescattering for the tunneling time delay in the quasistatic regime at relatively large laser fields, their contributions are reversed in weak fields.