Above-threshold ionization in two electromagnetic fields

Above-threshold ionization (ATI) is a process in which a target atom absorbs more than the minimum number of photons from an applied electromagnetic field than are required for ionization, and is characterized by several peaks in the photoelectron spectrum which are separated from each other by the energy of a single photon (Agostini et al. 1979). The experiments of interest in this work involve ATI at microwave frequencies (Gallagher 1988, Gallagher and Scholz 1989), where the frequency of the field is too low to be able to see individual peaks in the spectrum. What is seen is that, in the presence of a weak assisting field, a very large number of microwave photons are absorbed. This problem cannot be treated using standard methods, due both to the intensity of the microwave field and to the large numbers of photons absorbed. The focus of this work is on the development of new analytical techniques to examine the interaction of an atomic system with two simultaneous electromagnetic fields. Specifically, the work focuses on above-threshold ionization in combined microwave and laser fields, where the microwave field is a very strong, very low frequency field, so that standard techniques, such as perturbation theory, do not apply. The work is based on two theoretical methods especially designed for use in intense field problems. These are the Strong Field Approximation (SFA) (Reiss 1980, 1992, 1996), which describes the ionization of an atom by an intense field in which the detached electron remains free in the field after ionization occurs, and the Momentum Translation Approximation (MTA) (Reiss 1970a, 1970b, 1989), which describes the dressing of a bound atomic state by a strong field in which the field can alter the state of the electron without necessarily causing transitions. The laser field, which is much weaker, is treated by traditional techniques. The theory is developed in general terms using S-matrix methods, with particular cases being modeled using Fortran code on the physics department's VaxStation 2000 and VaxStation 4000. Numerical results are compared to experiment (Gallagher and Scholz 1989), and show good agreement in the major aspects of the physical process.