Time delay and nonadiabatic calibration of the attoclock. Multiphoton process versus tunneling in strong field interaction

Abstract

The measurement of the tunneling time delay in attosecond experiments, termed attoclock, sparked a heated debate about tunneling time and the role of time in quantum mechanics. We show a model that explains the experimental result of the attoclock in the nonadiabatic field calibration, where we find good agreement with the experimental data of Hofmann et al. (J. Mod. Opt. 66, 1052, 2019). We confirm our result with the numerical integration of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. We also found that at a field strength F≤Fa (Fa is the atomic field strength), the model always predicts a time delay with respect to the quantum (lower) limit τa at F=Fa. For an adiabatic tunneling, the saturation at the limit (F=Fa) explains the well-known Hartman effect or Hartman paradox. © 2024 The Author(s)