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Yi-Jia Mao

Publications and source records attributed to Yi-Jia Mao.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Attosecond Access to the Quantum Noise of Light

Bright squeezed light has entered strong-field atomic physics, creating an immediate need to characterize the quantum field delivered to the target on subcycle timescales. Here we show that attosecond streaking maps the coherent displacement and phase-sensitive covariance of a displaced squeezed field onto distinct harmonics: the mean photoelectron momentum follows an $ω$-periodic shift of the spectral center, whereas the momentum variance exhibits a $2ω$-periodic breathing. A Feynman--Vernon formulation represents Gaussian quantum light by stochastic vector-potential trajectories, enabling Coulomb-resolved TDSE simulations with a finite XUV gate and without explicit photon-state propagation. A coherent-state reference calibrates the streaking phase and variance background, enabling retrieval of the coherent amplitude and phase together with the squeezed-noise amplitude and squeezing phase. This establishes attosecond streaking as an in situ, gas-phase diagnostic of bright squeezed light.

quant-ph↗

Benchmarking Atomic Ionization Driven by Strong Quantum Light

The recently available high-intensity quantum light pulses provide novel tools for controlling light-matter interactions. However, the rigor of the theoretical frameworks currently used to describe the interaction of strong quantum light with atoms and molecules remains unverified. Here, we establish a rigorous benchmark by solving the fully quantized time-dependent Schrödinger equation for an atom exposed to bright squeezed vacuum light. Our \textit{ab initio} simulations reveal a critical limitation of the widely used $Q$-representation: although it accurately reproduces the total photoelectron spectrum after tracing over photon states, it completely fails to capture the electron-photon joint energy spectrum. To overcome this limitation, we develop a general theoretical framework based on the Feynman path integral that properly incorporates the electron-photon quantum entanglement. Our results provide both quantitative benchmarks and fundamental theoretical insights for the emerging field of strong-field quantum optics.

quant-ph↗

Coherent Control of Ion-Photoelectron Dynamics through Rabi Oscillations: An ab initio study

We present first-principles numerical simulations of photoionization in neon induced by bichromatic extreme ultraviolet pulses with frequencies $ω$ and $2ω$, specially chosen to make $ω$ equal to the energy difference between the $2s$ and $2p$ subshells. This allows for the production of photoelectrons from the $2s$ shell by $2ω$ pulse and from the $2p$ shell by $ω$ pulse with the same energy. Using the multi-configurational time-dependent Hartree-Fock method, we explore how Rabi coupling between subshells generates coherence between the corresponding photoelectron wave packets. Our \textit{ab initio} calculations confirm the analytical results derived from the essential-states approach in [K. L. Ishikawa, K. C. Prince, and K. Ueda, J. Phys. Chem. A 127, 10638 (2023)], validating the theoretical predictions. Although we focus on the Ne $2p$ and $2s$ subshells, our approach is applicable to a broad range of systems exhibiting photoionization from multiple subshells. The laser parameters employed in our simulations are available in modern Free Electron Lasers (FELs), and we anticipate that this work could stimulate experimental investigations using FELs to study ion-photoelectron coherence and entanglement.

physics.atom-ph↗