Odd electron wave packets from cycloidal ultrashort laser fields.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 30737394.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-019-08601-7 and PMC identifier 6368582.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Polarization-tailored bichromatic femtosecond laser fields with cycloidal polarization profiles have emerged as a powerful tool for coherent control of quantum processes. We present an optical scheme to create and manipulate three-dimensional free electron wave packets with arbitrary rotational symmetry by combining advanced supercontinuum pulse shaping with high resolution photoelectron tomography. Here we use carrier-envelope phase-stable polarization-tailored bichromatic (3ω:4ω) counter- and corotating femtosecond laser pulses to generate 7-fold rotational symmetric and asymmetric photoelectron momentum distributions by multiphoton ionization of sodium atoms. To elucidate the physical mechanisms, we investigate the interplay between the symmetry properties of the driving field and the resulting electron wave packets by varying the optical field parameters. Our results show that the symmetry properties of electron wave packets are not fully determined by the field symmetry, but completely described by multipath quantum interference of states with different angular momenta.