A quasiresonant laser field initiates the decay of an initially occupied atomic level into the continuum. If the amplitude of the external field is sufficiently high, other atomic levels, not meeting the condition for exact resonance, begin to participate in the atomic dynamics. This phenomenon leads to the stabilization of the atom.
It is shown that the rate and degree of ionization of an atom can be controlled by preparing a specific superposition of Rydberg states. This effect is due to the Raman interaction of Rydberg levels via resonant lower-lying levels of the atom. Depending on the initial population of an atom interacting with a strong laser field, the atom either ionizes completely or exhibits an extremely high degree of stability (in this case the probability of the atom remaining in a bound state when the laser pulse is switched off is close to 1). It is shown that states which are stable against ionization decay or, conversely, decay rapidly into the continuum can be prepared using double laser pulses with a controllable time delay.
The key subject of these lectures is Interference Stabilization (IS) of atoms in a strong laser field. Physics of the phenomenon, its various manifestations, as well as many related subtopics will be discussed. Generalizations to the case of two-colour interference stabilization will be briefly described. As it will be shown, owing to the achievable in this case very high degree of stabilization, the phenomenon appears to be very promising for making progress in such an important field as propagation of laser pulses in a gas medium. Since the first work on IS (Fedorov and Movsesian, 1988), there have been a lot of publications on this subject. I am not going to mention here all the relevant papers.
We present an atomic model to study above-threshold ionization (ATI). We show that when the laser field is sufficiently intense the usual perturbation theory is not valid. We solve the model dynamics exactly, and several interesting quantities, including the initial-state decay rate and photoelectron spectrum, are calculated. These quantities are related to recent ATI experiments, and qualitatively they agree with these experiments. We specify the strong-field condition for continuum–continuum transitions and explore its physical meaning. Finally some comments on perturbation theory are made.