title: 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.
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Chunyang
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zhai
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Lixin
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Pengfei
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Lan
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Xiaosong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Feng
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Wenjing
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Qingbin
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: School of Physics and Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.|Laboratory of Optical Information Technology, Wuhan Institute of Technology, Wuhan 430205, China.
authors.forename: Peixiang
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Lu