Calculations of photodissociation in intense laser fields: Validity of the adiabatic elimination of the continuum
Résumé
Abstract We investigate the range of applicability of the approximations of adiabatic and semiadiabatic elimination of the continuum in the numerical simulation of strong field photodissociation processes. By comparing exact and approximate calculations of the fragmentation of the H molecular ion when excited by a short and intense laser pulse, we show that these approximations do not hold when a few excited vibrational states are transiently populated. This failure mainly arises from the fast variation of the phases of the excited‐state time‐dependent amplitudes. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Quantum Chem, 2004