Measurement of laser intensities approaching 1015W/cm2with an accuracy of 1%

Abstract

Accurate knowledge of the intensity of focused ultra-short laser pulses is crucial to the correct interpretation of experimental results in strong-field physics. We have developed a technique to measure laser intensities approaching 10 15 W/cm 2 with an accuracy of 1%. This accuracy is achieved by comparing experimental photoelectron yields from atomic hydrogen with predictions from exact numerical solutions of the three-dimensional time-dependent Schrödinger equation. Our method can be extended to relativistic intensities and to the use of other atomic species.

Complete characterization of single-cycle double ionization of argon from the nonsequential to the sequential ionization regime

“…Despite the qualitative agreement between calculated and measured spectra, the overestimation of the measured intensity by a factor 2.5 is incompatible with the 20% uncertainty in the experimental intensity determination. We attribute this discrepancy to the systematic underestimation of electron momenta by semiclassical approaches [32].…”

Compact and flexible harmonic generator and three-color synthesizer for femtosecond coherent control and time-resolved studies

“…We find best agreement with the momentum shifts observed in the experiments when the intensities used in the simulation are 3 times higher than the experimentally retrieved intensities. The fact that electron momenta are systematically underestimated in a semi-classical approach is known (see for instance [50,51]). We note that the simple model cannot capture all details of the process, however we like to emphasize that a higher-level of theory was not essential here, since the results rather serve to demonstrate the capabilities of the waveform synthesizer.…”

Metastable noble gas atoms in strong-field ionization experiments

“…. The result for Equation (13) can be substituted into Equation (10) to provide a probability of tunnelling ionization for an arbitrary atom in an arbitrary Strong-field ionization of metastable atoms 5 electric field,…”

“…The process uses a least squares fitting procedure. This method has been used in previous work to compare theoretical TOF data to experiment using atomic hydrogen as the target to perform laser intensity calibration [10,111] . A comparison of experimentally measured ion yields to ADK and TDSE theory is shown in Figure 20.…”