Photoelectron circular dichroism of chiral molecules studied with a continuum-state-corrected strong-field approximation

Motivated by recent experiments on circular dichroism in the photoelectron momentum distributions from strong-field ionization of chiral molecules [C. Lux et al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 51, 5001 ( 2012); C. S. Lehmann et al., J. Chem. Phys. 139, 234307 ( 2013)], we investigate the origin of this effect theoretically. We show that it is not possible to describe photoelectron circular dichroism with the commonly used strong-field approximation due to its plane-wave nature. We therefore apply the Born approximation to the scattering state and use this as a continuum-state correction in the strong-field approximation. We obtain electron distributions for the molecules camphor and fenchone. In order to gain physical insight into the process, we study the contributions of individual molecular orientations.