Abstract

The study of ionization, dissociation and/or fragmentation of molecules in the gas phase under intense short pulse irradiation has received a lot of interest the last few years due to the significant information that can be revealed towards the understanding of elementary and fundamental physical and chemical processes.¹ For incident laser intensities in the range of 10^l2-10¹⁵ W/cm², the electric field of the focused laser beam can be equal or even larger than the internal fields which bind atoms together to form the molecules. As a result, the internal structure of the molecules can be significantly distorted and/or field ionization can take place. In addition, other strong field effects like atom-like behavior of molecules, multielectron excitation and Coulombic explosion can strongly influence the response of the molecule.

© 2000 IEEE