Frustrated double ionization in two-electron triatomic molecules

Using a semiclassical model, we investigate frustrated double ionization (FDI) in D3+, a two-electron triatomic molecule, when driven by an intense, linearly polarized, near-infrared (800 nm) laser field. We compute the kinetic energy release of the nuclei and find a good agreement between experiment and our model. We explore the two pathways of FDI and show that, with increasing field strength, over-the-barrier ionization overtakes tunnel ionization as the underlying mechanism of FDI. Moreover, we compute the angular distribution of the ion fragments for FDI and identify a feature that can potentially be observed experimentally and is a signature of only one of the two pathways of FDI.