Abstract

Recently there has been growing interest in investigating diatomic molecules in intense fields. Although our ideas have matured considerably over the past five or six years, we are just beginning to put together a coherent picture of dissociative ionization. Since dissociation and ionization are interdependent, leading to the ejection of several electrons with a variety of energies and a spectrum of ions in an array of ionization stages, a dearer understanding of the dynamics requires unambiguous knowledge of the probability for correlating ejection of the fragments. To that end, we have employed our 4π electron-ion image spectrometer to study the dissociative ionization spectra of diatomic systems. This spectrometer produces two-dimensional digital images (Figs, 1a and 1b) from which the differential cross section as a function of energy and angle can be extracted for both electrons and ions simultaneously. These images were obtained subsequent to dissociative ionization of H₂ by 70 ps, 532 run radiation focused to about 10¹⁴ W/ cm².

© 1996 Optical Society of America