Abstract

The advent of attosecond technology and the generation of intense ultrashort laser pulses raises the possibility to investigate atomic, molecular, and nuclear physics at this new time-scale, bringing a revolution in our microscopic knowledge and understanding of matter. Two fascinating and complementary challenges of Attoscience are to identify the physical mechanisms underlying the correlated multi-electron dynamics—of fundamental interest to, for instance, molecular imaging—in atomic systems and to devise schemes to probe/control these mechanisms.

We discuss first the mechanisms underlying the correlated electron dynamics for two fundamental processes: a) non-sequential double ionization in strongly driven He b) multi-electron ionization by a sequence of attosecond collisions when a single photon is absorbed by multi-electron atoms. Currently, the state of the art is time-resolving multi-electron effects in processes where one electron leaves the atom. For the first time, we present the two-electron streak camera that allows for time-resolving electron-electron correlation of intra-atomic collision dynamics.