Observation of Attosecond Time Delays in Above-Threshold Ionization

Abstract

Attosecond-scale temporal characterization of photoionization is essential in understanding how light and matter interact on the most fundamental level. However, characterizing the temporal property of strong-field above-threshold ionization has remained unreached. Here, we propose a novel photoelectron interferometric method to disentangle the contribution of Coulomb effect from an attoclock, allowing us to clock energy-resolved time delays of strong-field above-threshold ionization. We disentangle two types of Coulomb effects for the attoclock, i.e., one arising from the Coulomb disturbance of a single electron trajectory and the second effect arising from the photoelectron phase space distortion due to the Coulomb field. We find that the second Coulomb effect manifests itself as an energy-resolved attosecond time delay in the electron emission, which is relevant to the effect of nonadiabatic initial longitudinal momentum at the tunnel exit. Our study further indicates a sensitivity of the time delay to the temporal profile of the released electron wave packet within one half laser cycle. The temporal width of the released electron wave packet is found to increase with energy, which contradicts the common assumption in the adiabatic picture.