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Potential barriers in the effective radial potential experienced by a photoexcited electron are shown to result in dramatic, resonancelike effects in two-photon ionization processes. In a two-photon ionization process, such potential barriers may affect not only the final state of the electron (as in ordinary photoionization), but also the intermediate-state electron wave packet corresponding to the absorption of one photon. We illustrate these effects for the generalized two-photon cross sections for ionization of Ar and Xe within a single-active-electron, central-potential model.

An analytical method for calculating the electromagnetic fields of a nonparaxial elegant Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) vortex beam is presented for arbitrary pulse duration, spot size, and LG mode. This perturbative approach provides a numerically tractable model for the calculation of arbitrarily high radial and azimuthal LG modes in the nonparaxial regime, without requiring integral representations of the fields. A key feature of this perturbative model is its use of a Poisson-like frequency spectrum, which allows for the proper description of pulses of arbitrarily short duration. This model is thus appropriate for simulating laser-matter interactions, including those involving short laser pulses.

An analytic description for the yield, P(p), of high-energy electrons ionized from an atom by a short (few-cycle) laser pulse is obtained quantum mechanically. Factorization of P(p) in terms of an electron wave packet and the cross section for elastic electron scattering (EES) is shown to occur only for an ultrashort pulse, while in general P(p) involves interference of EES amplitudes with laser-field-dependent momenta. The analytic predictions agree well with accurate numerical results.