Interaction of dense nanoplasmas with intense laser fields: Ionization dynamics in large silver clusters

The interaction of intense laser fields with silver clusters is investigated theoretically using the nanoplasma model. Motivated by recent experiments with dual pulse excitation, special attention is directed on the ionization dynamics. The yield of highly charged ions is sensitive to the delay between the two pulses which is connected with resonance phenomena in the excitation. For a single cluster size, a rich structure in the yield as a function of the delay is found in the numerical results. This structure is smeared out, however, for cluster size distributions occuring in the experiments mentioned above. (c) 2007 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.