Coulomb-corrected molecular orbital tomography of nitrogen

Abstract

High-order harmonic generation (HHG) from aligned molecules has provided a promising way to probe the molecular orbital with an Ångström resolution. This method, usually called molecular orbital tomography (MOT) replies on a simple assumption of the plane-wave approximation (PW), which has long been questioned due to that PW approximation is known to be valid in the keV energy region. However, the photon energy is usually no more than 100 eV in HHG. In this work, we experimentally reconstruct the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) of nitrogen (N2) by using a Coulomb-corrected MOT (CCMOT) method. In our scheme, the molecular continuum states are described by a Coulomb wave function instead of the PW approximation. With CCMOT, the reconstructed orbital is demonstrated to agree well with the theoretical prediction and retain the main features of the HOMO of N2. Compared to the PW approximation method, the CCMOT shows a significant improvement in eliminating the artificial structures caused by PW approximation.