Anh-Thu Le et al 2008 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 41 081002 doi:10.1088/0953-4075/41/8/081002
Anh-Thu Le1, R Della Picca2, P D Fainstein2, D A Telnov3, M Lein4 and C D Lin1
Show affiliationsWe show that high-order harmonics generated from molecules by intense laser pulses can be expressed as the product of a returning electron wave packet and the photo-recombination cross section where the electron wave packet can be obtained from the simple strong-field approximation (SFA) or from a companion atomic target. Using these wave packets but replacing the photo-recombination cross sections obtained from SFA or from the atomic target by the accurate cross sections from molecules, the resulting high-order harmonic spectra are shown to agree well with the benchmark results from direct numerical solution of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation, for the case of H+2 in laser fields. The result illustrates that these powerful theoretical tools can be used for obtaining high-order harmonic spectra from molecules. More importantly, the results imply that the photo-recombination cross section extracted from laser-induced high-order harmonic spectra can be used for time-resolved dynamic chemical imaging of transient molecules with temporal resolutions down to a few femtoseconds.
33.80.-b Photon interactions with molecules
31.15.-p Calculations and mathematical techniques in atomic and molecular physics
42.65.Ky Frequency conversion; harmonic generation, including higher-order harmonic generation
Issue 8 (28 April 2008)
Received 15 February 2008
Published 3 April 2008
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