Physical Review A
Strong variation of the phase lag in the vicinity of autoionizing resonances
Rekishu Yamazaki, Daniel S. Elliott
Abstract
We have observed the phase lag in the sinusoidal variation of the asymmetric photoelectron angular distributions into two ionization channels of atomic barium using an $\ensuremath{\omega}\text{\ensuremath{-}}2\ensuremath{\omega}$ excitation scheme. We excite atomic barium from the $6s6p\text{ }{^{1}P}_{1}$ intermediate state electron to an energy between the $5{d}_{3∕2}ϵ$ and the $5{d}_{5∕2}ϵ$ thresholds with concurrent one-photon and two-photon interactions. The left-right asymmetry of the photoelectron angular distributions for the two energy-resolved product states, $6{s}_{1∕2}ϵ$ and $5{d}_{3∕2}ϵ$, show sinusoidal modulation as a function of the relative phase of the $\ensuremath{\omega}\text{\ensuremath{-}}2\ensuremath{\omega}$ fields. The phase difference between these signals, or phase lag, varies rapidly with the laser frequency when the interaction is nearly resonant with autoionizing resonances in the continuum. An exceptionally large phase lag variation of over $2\ensuremath{\pi}$ was measured.