Stuttgart 2012 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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A: Fachverband Atomphysik
A 10: Interaction with strong or short laser pulses II
A 10.7: Vortrag
Montag, 12. März 2012, 18:00–18:15, V55.01
Laser-assisted α decay — •Héctor Mauricio Castañeda Cortés1, Sergey Popruzhenko2, Adriana Pálffy1, and Christoph H. Keitel1 — 1Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Saupfercheckweg 1, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany — 2Moscow State Engineering Physics Institute, Russia
The spontaneous emission of alpha particles by unstable nuclei was one of the first physical processes to be described by quantum tunneling of a quasistationary state, i.e. a long-lived state. The development of new powerful coherent light sources opens the possibility to study the direct interaction between strong laser fields and atomic nuclei, assisting the tunneling of the α particle through the nuclear barrier.
In this work we investigate for the first time the effect of strong laser fields on the tunneling and α particle emission of several medium-mass and heavy nuclei. To this end we make use of the formalism we have developed starting from the well-known Strong-Field Approximation and its complex trajectories formulation to describe the laser-assisted decay of quasistationary states [1]. The effect of a static as well as optical and x-ray monochromatic fields on the α decay lifetimes and α particle emission spectra is determined. We find that even at strong intensities, the laser-induced acceleration of the α decay is negligible, and only the spectra are significantly changed by the laser field. In particular, for optical fields, high laser intensities can lead to rescattering of the α particle off the daughter nucleus.
[1] H. M. Castañeda Cortés, S. V. Popruzhenko, D. Bauer and A. Pálffy, New J. Phys. 13, 063007 (2011).