Climbing the N-shell resonance ladder of xenon
Steffen Palutke1, Michael Martins2, Stephan Klumpp1, Karolin Baev1,2, Mathias Richter3, Tobias
Wagner2, Marion Kuhlmann1, Mabel Ruiz-Lopez1, Michael Meyer4 and Kai Tiedtke1
1Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Notkestr. 85, 22607 Hamburg, Germany
2Department of Physics, University of Hamburg, Luruper Chaussee 149, 22761 Hamburg, Germany
3Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Abbestr. 2-12, 10587 Berlin, Germany
4European XFEL, Holzkoppel 4, 22869 Schenefeld, Germany
The dependency on the excitation energy of ultrafast multi-photon ionization of xenon by intense,
short extreme ultraviolet pulses (XUV) was investigated in the vicinity of the 4d ‘giant’ resonance
using ion time-of-flight spectroscopy. The yields of the high charge states of xenon show strong
variations with the excitation energy. With reference to simulated absorption spectra, we can link
the photon energy dependency to resonance structures of single-electron excitations mainly in
the xenon N-shell and purely sequential multi-photon absorption.
I. Introduction
Since the early days of spectroscopy, rare
gases are widely used, either as
commissioning and calibration sample of
spectrometers or as part of pioneering
experiments whenever new light sources
become available, such as free-electron
lasers (FELs).
Free-electron lasers allow the generation of
intense short light pulses from the XUV to the
hard x-ray regime. With up to 1013 photons
per pulse with pulse durations from a few fs
to a few 100 fs, FELs generate peak
brilliances which are up to ten orders of
magnitude higher than those of modern
third-generation radiation sources. FELs
enable the investigation of the interaction of
matter with extreme laser fields and atomic
and electronic dynamics on fs time scales.
Pioneering experiments have been
performed in the XUV and x-ray regime
mostly on the aforementioned rare-gas
atoms, but also on molecules and clusters [1-
7].
Despite being seemingly simple systems,
rare gases, especially xenon, generate up to
now new insides into multi-photon
ionization and correlated processes induced
by the short XUV and x-ray pulses, see for
example [3, 5, 8-13].
The electron-rich xenon atom acts as a model
system to pave the way to understand the
ionization and relaxation processes in more
complex electronic systems such as
molecules and proteins which contain heavy
atoms. An important specific example is
iodine, which is a trace element with a vital
impact on atmospheric chemistry [14] and
biological processes in living organisms [15].
One of the pioneering experiments was
performed by Sorokin et al. [3] on xenon
using FEL pulses in the XUV region. They
found Xe21+ ions after the irradiation with
highly intense XUV pulses in the vicinity of
the xenon 4d ‘giant’ resonance [16, 17] at a
photon energy of about 93 eV (13.3 nm).
According to this work, at least 57 photons
have to be absorbed in total by a xenon atom
to be ionized 21-fold. Seven XUV photons
alone are required at least to overcome the
Xe20+ ionization threshold from its ground
state.
Under so far considered experimental
conditions, it is established that up to a
charge state of Xe5+ the ionization can be
explained by sequential one-photon
absorption steps followed by Auger-Meitner
processes or direct photoelectron emission.
Starting from Xe5+ multi-photon processes