We comparatively study electron rotational asymmetries in photoionization of the excited hydrogen atom and photodetachment of the fluorine anion in single circularly polarized laser fields by numerically solving the three-dimensional time-dependent Schrödinger equation (3D-TDSE). We first show that single-photon ionization (or detachment) is more favored for the electron initially corotates with respect to the direction of the laser field. More interestingly, we systematically demonstrate the electron rotational asymmetry of the excited hydrogen atom is completely contrary to that of the fluorine anion in multiphoton ionization (or detachment) regime, which can be attributed to the role played by excited bound states by analyzing the total excitation probability in the excited hydrogen atom. Furthermore, we also confirmed that the electron rotational asymmetry of 2p+ and 2p− degenerate orbitals in the excited hydrogen atom changes when the ionization mechanism switches from three-photon to over-the-barrier.

We present a theoretical study of the orbital-resolved photoelectron momentum distributions (PMDs) of F- ions by a two-color counter-rotating circularly polarized field. We show that the PMDs of F- ions can be modulated from an isotropic symmetric distribution into a three-lobe one by adding a weak fundamental counter-rotating field to the intense second harmonic circularly polarized field, and this modulation strongly depends on the initial atomic orbital. The PMDs simulated by the strong-field approximation method show good agreement with those obtained by solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. Based on the strong-field approximation method, we find that the radial momentum shift of PMDs for different orbitals is the fingerprint of orbital-dependent initial momentum at the tunnel exit. More importantly, we demonstrate that the lobes in PMDs appear in sequential order, highlighting that the scheme can be viewed as controllable rotating temporal Young’s two-slit interferometer.