We investigate the target and intensity dependence of plateau in high-order above threshold ionization (HATI) by simulating the two-dimensional (2D) momentum distributions and the energy spectra of photoelectrons in HATI of rare gas atoms through using the quantitative rescattering model. The simulated results are compared with the existing experimental measurements. It is found that the slope of the plateau in the HATI photoelectron energy spectrum highly depends on the structure of elastic scattering differential cross section (DCS) of laser-induced returning electron with its parent ion. The investigations of the long- and short-range potential effects in the DCSs reveal that the short-range potential, which reflects the structure of the target, plays an essential role in generating the HATI photoelectron spectra.

Laser-induced electron diffraction (LIED), in which elastic scattering of the returning electron with the parent ion takes place, has been used to extract atomic potential and image molecular structures with sub-Å precision and exposure time of a few femtoseconds. So far, the polarization and exchange effects have not been taken into account in the theoretical calculation of differential cross section (DCS) for the laser-induced rescattering processes. However, the validity of this theoretical treatment has never been verified. In this work, we investigate the polarization and exchange effects on electron impact elastic scattering with rare gas atoms and ions. It is found that, while the exchange effect generally plays a more important role than the polarization effect in the elastic scattering process, the exchange effect is less important on electronion collisions than on electron-atom collisions, especially for scattering in backward direction. In addition, our calculations show that, for electron-atom collisions at incident energies above 50 eV, both the polarization and exchange effects can be safely neglected, while for electron-ion collisions, both the polarization and exchange potentials do not make substantial contributions to the DCS at incident energies above 20 eV and scattering angles larger than 90 • . Our investigation confirms the validity of the current LIED method.