Ionization of Molecular Hydrogen in Ultrashort Intense Laser Pulses

A novel ab initio numerical approach is developed and applied that solves the time-dependent Schrödinger equation describing two-electron diatomic molecules (e.g. molecular hydrogen) exposed to an intense ultrashort laser pulse. The method is based on the fixed-nuclei and the non-relativistic dipole approximations and aims to accurately describe both correlated electrons in full dimensionality. The method is applicable for a wide range of the laser pulse parameters and is able to describe both few-photon and many-photon single ionization processes, also in a non-perturbative regime. A key advantage of the method is its ability to treat the strong-field response of the molecules with arbitrary orientation of the molecular axis with respect to the linear-polarized laser field. Thus, this work reports on the first successful orientation-dependent analysis of the multiphoton ionization of H2 performed by means of a full-dimensional numerical treatment. Besides the investigation of few-photon regime, an extensive numerical study of the ionization by ultrashort frequency-doubled Ti:sapphire laser pulses (400 nm) is presented. Performing a series of calculations for different internuclear separations, the total ionization yields of H2 and D2 in their ground vibrational states are obtained for both parallel and perpendicular orientations. A series of calculations for 800 nm laser pulses are used to test a popular simple interference model. Besides the discussion of the ab initio numerical method, this work considers different aspects related to the application of the strong-field approximation (SFA) for investigation of a strong-field response of an atomic and molecular system. Thus, a deep analysis of the gauge problem of SFA is performed and the quasistatic limit of the velocity-gauge SFA ionization rates is derived. The applications of the lengthgauge SFA are examined and a recently proposed generalized Keldysh theory is criticized.