Two-color stabilization of atomic hydrogen in circularly polarized laser fields

Abstract

Dynamic stabilization of atomic hydrogen against ionization in high-frequency single- and two-color, circularly polarized laser pulses is observed by numerically solving the three-dimensional, time-dependent Schrödinger equation. The single-color case is revisited and numerically determined ionization rates are compared with both, exact and approximate high-frequency Floquet rates. The position of the peaks in the photoelectron spectra can be explained with the help of dressed initial states. In two-color laser fields of opposite circular polarization the stabilized probability density may be shaped in various ways. For laser frequencies $ω_1$ and $ω_2=nω_1$, $n=2,3,...$ and sufficiently large excursion amplitudes $n+1$ distinct probability density peaks are observed. This may be viewed as the generalization of the well-known ``dichotomy'' in linearly polarized laser fields, i.e, as ``trichotomy,'' ``quatrochotomy,'' ``pentachotomy'' etc. All those observed structures and their ``hula-hoop''-like dynamics can be understood with the help of high-frequency Floquet theory and the two-color Kramers-Henneberger transformation. The shaping of the probability density in the stabilization regime can be realized without additional loss in the survival probability, as compared to the corresponding single-color results.

10 pages, REVTeX4, 11 eps-figures, see also http://www.physik.tu-darmstadt.de/tqe/dieter/publist.html for a manuscript with higher-quality figures