Electron affinity of lead

International audienceA beam of Pb− ions produced by a cesium sputtering ion source is photodetached in the presence of an electric field, inside a linear optical cavity. Amplification of the light flux by the resonant cavity makes it possible to record exploitable photoelectron interferograms, even though the Pb− current does not exceed a few pA. The laser wavenumber is set either just above the first 3P1 finestructure excited threshold of neutral Pb, or above the higher 3P2 threshold. The photoelectron kinetic energy is deduced from the electron interferograms with a precision high enough to provide a new experimental value of the electron affinity of lead, 8 times more precise and slightly lower than the one measured in 2016: eA(Pb) = 287 714.9(1.5) m-1 or 0.356 721(2) eV, instead of 287 733(13) m−1 or 0.356 743(16) eV

High-order harmonic generation in an active grating

International audienceWe study theoretically and experimentally high-order harmonic generation (HHG) using two noncollinear driving fields focused in gases. We show that these two fields form a nonstationary blazed active grating in the generation medium. The intensity and phase structure of this grating rule the far-field properties of the emission, such as the relative amplitude of the diffraction orders. Full macroscopic calculations and experiments support this wave-based picture of the process, complementing and extending its standard “photon” picture. This insight into the HHG process allows us to envision structuration schemes to convert femtosecond lasers to attosecond pulses with increased efficiency

Gas temperature measurements in oxygen plasmas by high-resolution Two-Photon Absorption Laser-induced Fluorescence

International audienceOne of the most important, and difficult to measure, parameters of laboratory discharges in molecular gases is the gas translational temperature. We propose a novel technique to measure directly, with excellent spatial and temporal resolution, the velocity distribution of ground-state atoms (oxygen atoms in this case) in plasmas from the Doppler broadening of their laser excitation spectra. The method is based on the well-known Two-Photon Laser-induced Fluorescence (TALIF) technique, but uses a specially-built pulsed tunable ultraviolet laser with very narrow bandwidth which allows the Doppler profiles to be measured with high precision. This laser consists of a pulsed Nd:YAG-pumped Ti:Sapphire ring cavity which is injection-seeded by a single-mode cw Ti:sapphire laser. The single-mode infrared output pulses are frequency quadrupled by two non-linear crystals to reach the necessary UV wavelength (226 nm, 0.2 mJ) for TALIF excitation. This technique should be applicable to a wide range of discharges, ranging from low-pressure RF plasmas for surface processing to atmospheric pressure plasmas. Results of preliminary tests on low-pressure O 2 DC discharges are presented

Angle-resolved studies of XUV–IR two-photon ionization in the RABBITT scheme

International audienceReconstruction of attosecond beating by interference of two-photon transitions (RABBITT) is an established technique for studying time-delay in photoionization of atoms and molecules. It has been recently extended to angle-resolved studies, accessing diverse fingerprint observables of the attosecond photoemission dynamics within the bound-continuum and continuumcontinuum transitions. In this work, we address the general form of the ISB(,) two-photon photoelectron angular distributions (PADs) associated to the RABBITT sideband signal, as a function of the emission angle , and the delay between the XUV attosecond pulse train and the infrared (IR) dressing field at play in the RABBITT scheme. Relying on the expansion in Legendre polynomials, the PAD is synthesized in terms of a reduced set of coefficients which fully describe both its static (-independent) and dynamic (-dependent) components and enables us to retrieve any observable characterizing the PAD. This unified framework streamlines the comparison between different experimental or theoretical data sets and emphasizes how some observables depend on the experimental conditions. Along with the modelled analysis, we report new results of angle-resolved RABBITT direct ionization of the np valence orbital of Ar(3p 6) and Ne(2p 6), employing electron-ion coincidence momentum spectroscopy at the new Attolab facility. In this case, the nine coefficients synthesizing the PAD are further linked to the magnitude and phase of the transition dipole matrix elements, providing a fundamental test of theoretical predictions. Similarities and differences are found between Ar and Ne in the explored low energy region, up to 20 eV above the ionization threshold, where the electron dynamics is most sensitive to electronic correlation. Further interpretation of these results would benefit from a comparison with advanced many-body theoretical simulations

Angle-resolved RABBITT : from atoms to molecules

We report recent results of photoelectron angular distributions (PADs) for photoionization (PI) of atomic and molecular targets, resolved in the time domain at the attosecond scale, combining electron-ion coincidence momentum spectroscopy and the RABBITT scheme. We propose a unified formalism synthetizing the PAD(θ,τ) results in terms of a reduced set of coefficients

Angle-resolved RABBITT : from atoms to molecules

ICPEAC2019 - The XXXIst International Conference on Photonic, Electronic, and Atomic Collisions, Deauville 2019, FranceInternational audienceSynopsis We report recent results of photoelectron angular distributions (PADs) for photoionization (PI) of atomic and molecular targets, resolved in the time domain at the attosecond scale, combining electron-ion coincidence momentum spectroscopy and the RABBITT scheme. We propose a unified formalism synthetizing the PAD( θ, τ ) results in terms of a reduced set of coefficients