Berlin 2014 – scientific programme

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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 18: Interaction with strong or short laser pulses II

A 18.2: Talk

Tuesday, March 18, 2014, 14:30–14:45, BEBEL E34

Photoelectron circular dichroism in above threshold ionization of chiral molecules — •Ingo Dreissigacker and Manfred Lein — Institut für Theoretische Physik, Leibniz Universität Hannover

Motivated by a recent experiment on circular dichroism in the photoelectron momentum distributions of chiral molecules from strong-field ionization [Lux et al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 51, 5001 (2012)], we investigate this effect theoretically. For the first time, we are able to compute the asymmetric response of a sample of randomly oriented chiral molecules to a strong circularly polarized field non-perturbatively and from first principles. The strong-field approximation fails to describe this process due to its plane-wave nature. We therefore apply the Born approximation to the scattering state and use this as a continuum-state correction in the strong-field approximation. In this way, we obtain spectra of the molecules camphor and fenchone and study contributions of individual molecular orientations to the asymmetric photoelectron emission in order to improve the physical understanding of the process.