Basic reactions involving water molecules are essential to understand the interaction between radiation and the biological tissue because living cells are composed mostly by water. Therefore, the knowledge of ionization of the latter is crucial in many domains of Biology and Physics. So, we study theoretically the photoionization of water molecules by extreme ultraviolet attopulse trains assisted by lasers in the near-infrared range. We use a separable Coulomb-Volkov model in which the temporal evolution of the system can be divided into three stages allowing spatial and temporal separation for the Coulomb and Volkov final state wavefunctions. First, we analyze photoelectron angular distributions for different delays between the attopulse train and the assistant laser field. We compare our results for water and Ne atoms as they belong to the same isoelectronic series. Moreover, we contrast our calculations with previous theoretical and experimental work for Ar atoms due to the similarities of the orbitals involved in the reaction. Second, we study the effect of varying the relative orientations of the attopulse and laser field polarizations and we compare our predictions with other theories and experiments. We expect these studies contribute to the improvement of polarization experiments and the development of the attopulse trains and assistant laser fields technologies. Finally, we hope our work promote progress on the control of the chemical reactivity of water molecules since this could be useful in different fields such as radiobiology and medical physics.

Date Published: 25 August 2017
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 10347, Optical Trapping and Optical Micromanipulation XIV, 103472X (25 August 2017); doi: 10.1117/12.2273198

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10347:
Optical Trapping and Optical Micromanipulation XIV
Kishan Dholakia; Gabriel C. Spalding, Editor(s)