There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
The dissociation spectrum of the hydrogen molecular ion by short intense pulses of
infrared light is calculated. The time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation is discretized
and integrated in position and momentum space. For few-cycle pulses one can resolve
vibrational structure that commonly arises in the experimental preparation of the
molecular ion from the neutral molecule. We calculate the corresponding energy spectrum
and analyze the dependence on the pulse time-delay, pulse length, and intensity of
the laser for \(\lambda \sim 790\)nm. We conclude that the proton spectrum is a both
a sensitive probe of the vibrational dynamics and the laser pulse. Finally we compare
our results with recent measurements of the proton spectrum for 55 fs pulses using
a Ti:Sapphire laser (\(\lambda \sim 790 \)nm). Integrating over the laser focal volume,
for the intensity \(I \sim 3 \times 10^{15}\)W cm\(^{-2}\), we find our results are in
excellent agreement with these experiments.