Abstract

The interaction of intense laser light with atoms has been an area of active research for many years. One of the most surprizing findings has been stabilization, the reduction in ionization as a function of increasing intensity, in the interaction of atomic systems with intense high frequency laser fields. In all time-dependent studies to date, the interaction has been driven by a linearly polarized laser field. The reason for this restriction has been the prohibitively large basis set required to describe adequately interactions with elliptically polarized light. Recently, we have proposed and implemented a method for numerically solving the two-dimensional Schrodinger equation, allowing investigation of laser-atom interactions with arbitrary laser polarizations, the only approximations being the reduced dimensionality and smoothing of the Coulomb singularity [1]. We use this approach to investigate time-dependent stabilization in high intensity, high frequency fields of arbitrary polarization and predict unusual toroidal stabilized wavepackets.

© 1998 IEEE