Observing the ultrafast buildup of a Fano resonance in the time domain.

Although the time-dependent buildup of asymmetric Fano line shapes in absorption spectra has been of great theoretical interest in the past decade, experimental verification of the predictions has been elusive. Here, we report the experimental observation of the emergence of a Fano resonance in the prototype system of helium by interrupting the autoionization process of a correlated two-electron excited state with a strong laser field. The tunable temporal gate between excitation and termination of the resonance allows us to follow the formation of a Fano line shape in time.

Anomalous Fano Profiles in External Fields.

We show that the external control of Fano resonances in general leads to complex Fano q parameters. Fano line shapes of photoelectron and transient absorption spectra in the presence of an infrared control field are investigated. Computed transient absorption spectra are compared with a model proposed for a recent experiment [C.

Time-resolved photoemission on the attosecond scale: opportunities and challenges.

The interaction of laser pulses of sub-femtosecond duration with matter opened up the opportunity to explore electronic processes on their natural time scale. One central conceptual question posed by the observation of photoemission in real time is whether the ejection of the photoelectron wavepacket occurs instantaneously, or whether the response time to photoabsorption is finite leading to a time delay in photoemission. Recent experimental progress exploring attosecond streaking and RABBIT techniques find relative time delays between the photoemission from different atomic substates to be of the order of -20 attoseconds.

Multielectron transitions induced by neutron impact on helium.

We explore excitation and ionization by neutron impact as a novel tool for the investigation of electron-electron correlations in helium. We present single- and double-ionization spectra calculated in accurate numerical ab initio simulations for incoming neutrons with kinetic energies of up to 150 keV. The resulting electron spectra are found to be fundamentally different from photoionization or charged particle impact due to the intrinsic many-body character of the interaction.