The RMT method for describing many-electron atoms in intense short laser pulses

Abstract

We describe how we have extended the underlying methods of the HELIUM code to describe multi-electron systems exposed to intense short-pulse laser light. We achieve this extension through exploiting the powerful R-matrix division-of-space concept to bring together a numerical method (basis set) most appropriate to the multi-electron finite inner region and a different numerical method (finite difference) most appropriate to the one-electron outer region. In order for the method to exploit massively parallel supercomputers efficiently, we time-propagate the wave function in both regions by employing schemes based on the Arnoldi method, long employed in HELIUM.