Billard game in an atom: Physicists trace the double ionization of argon atoms on attosecond time scales
(Phys.org) -- When an intense laser pulse interacts with an atom it generates agitation on the micro scale. A rather likely outcome of this interaction is single ionization, where one electron is ejected from the atom. From time to time, however, two electrons can be removed from the atom, resulting in the more complex process of double ionization. The detailed course of this process on attosecond time scales (an attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second) has been observed by an international team lead by researchers from the Laboratory for Attosecond Physics at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in close collaboration with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics. The researchers report on their results in Nature Communications.