Laser pulses with stable electric field waveforms establish the opportunity to achieve coherent control on attosecond timescales. We present experimental and theoretical results on the steering of electronic motion in a multi-electron system. A very high degree of light-waveform control over the directional emission of C+ and O+ fragments from the dissociative ionization of CO was observed. Ab initio based model calculations reveal contributions to the control related to the ionization and laser-induced population transfer between excited electronic states of CO+ during dissociation.
Streaking of photoelectrons has long been used for the temporal characterization of attosecond extreme ultraviolet pulses. When the time-resolved photoelectrons originate from a coherent superposition of electronic states, they carry an additional phase information, which can be retrieved by the streaking technique. In this contribution we extend the streaking formalism to include coupled electron and nuclear dynamics in molecules as well as initial coherences and demonstrate how it offers a novel tool to monitor non-adiabatic dynamics as it occurs in the vicinity of conical intersections and avoided crossings. Streaking can enhance the time resolution and provide direct signatures of electronic coherences, which affect many primary photochemical and biological events.
A family of Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) methods is designed to maximize the resource of existing noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. However, VQE approaches encounter various difficulties in simulating molecules of industrially relevant sizes, among which the choice of the ansatz for the molecular wavefunction plays a crucial role. In this work, we push forward the capabilities of adaptive variational algorithms (ADAPT-VQE) by demonstrating that the measurement overhead can be significantly reduced via adding multiple operators at each step while keeping the ansatz compact. Within the proposed approach, we simulate a set of molecules, O$_2$, CO, and CO$_2$, participating in the carbon monoxide oxidation processes using the statevector simulator and compare our findings with the results obtained using VQE-UCCSD and classical methods. Based on these results, we estimate the energy characteristics of the chemical reaction. Our results pave the way to the use of variational approaches for solving practically relevant chemical problems.
We analyze the attosecond electron dynamics in hydrogen molecular ion driven by an external intense laser field using ab-initio numerical simulations of the corresponding time-dependent Schr{{o}}dinger equation and Bohmian trajectories. To this end, we employ a one-dimensional model of the molecular ion in which the motion of the protons is frozen. The results of the Bohmian trajectory calculations do agree well with those of the ab-initio simulations and clearly visualize the electron transfer between the two protons in the field. In particular, the Bohmian trajectory calculations confirm the recently predicted attosecond transient localization of the electron at one of the protons and the related multiple bunches of the ionization current within a half cycle of the laser field. Further analysis based on the quantum trajectories shows that the electron dynamics in the molecular ion can be understood via the phase difference accumulated between the Coulomb wells at the two protons. Modeling of the dynamics using a simple two-state system leads us to an explanation for the sometimes counter-intuitive dynamics of an electron opposing the classical force of the electric field on the electron.
In quantum systems, coherent superpositions of electronic states evolve on ultrafast timescales (few femtosecond to attosecond, 1 as = 0.001 fs = 10^{-18} s), leading to a time dependent charge density. Here we exploit the first attosecond soft x-ray pulses produced by an x-ray free-electron laser to induce a coherent core-hole excitation in nitric oxide. Using an additional circularly polarized infrared laser pulse we create a clock to time-resolve the electron dynamics, and demonstrate control of the coherent electron motion by tuning the photon energy of the x-ray pulse. Core-excited states offer a fundamental test bed for studying coherent electron dynamics in highly excited and strongly correlated matter.
Multi-electron dynamics in atoms and molecules very often occur on sub- to few-femtosecond timescales. The available intensities of extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) attosecond pulses have previously only allowed the time-resolved investigation of two-photon, two-electron interactions. Here we demonstrate attosecond control over double and triple ionization of argon atoms involving the absorption of up to five XUV photons. In an XUV-pump XUV-probe measurement using a pair of attosecond pulse trains (APTs), the Ar$^{2+}$ ion yield exhibits a weak delay dependence, showing that its generation predominantly results from the sequential emission of two electrons by photoabsorption from the two APTs. In contrast, the Ar$^{3+}$ ion yield exhibits strong modulations as a function of the delay, which is a clear signature of the simultaneous absorption of at least two XUV photons. The experimental results are well reproduced by numerical calculations that provide detailed insights into the ionization dynamics. Our results open up new opportunities for the investigation and control of multi-electron dynamics and complex electron correlation mechanisms on extremely short timescales.