Prof. Wu and his collabrators' dissertaion on Nature Communications.
On Oct. 10, ECNU Prof. Wu Jian from State Key Laboratory of Precision Spectroscopy published Probing the tunnelling site of electrons in strong field enhanced ionization of molecules on Nature Communications, in collaboration with Prof. R. Döner from Goethe University Frankfurt and other fellow scholars. With well designed experiments, thedissertation successfully verified the long-standing physical prediction of enhanced ionization of molecules made by scientists 20 years ago.
Chemical reactions and the transformation of molecular structures attribute to the movement of atomic nucleus and electron. The research and control of molecules' enhanced multielectron dissociative ionization is conducive to understanding and manipulating those basic physical and chemical process and biological cell functions.
Molecules show a much increased multiple ionization rate in a strong laser field as compared with atoms of similar ionization energy. A widely accepted model attributes this to the action of the joint fields of the adjacent ionic core and the laser on its neighbour inside the same molecule. The underlying physical picture for the enhanced ionization is that it is the up-field atom that gets ionized. However, this is still debated and remains unproven.
In the dissertation, Prof. Wu and his collaborators report an experimental verification of this long-standing prediction by probing the two-site double ionization of ArXe, where the instantaneous field direction at the moment of electron release and the emission direction of the correlated ionizing centre are measured by detecting the recoil sum- and relative-momenta of the fragment ions. Their results unambiguously prove the intuitive picture of the enhanced multielectron dissociative ionization of molecules and clarify a long-standing controversy.
Written by: Fu Fangqin
Edited by: Liu Jinyu
