Exact potential driving the electron dynamics in enhanced ionization of H2+

Abstract

It was recently shown that the exact factorization of the electron-nuclear wave function allows the construction of a Schrödinger equation for the electronic system, in which the potential contains exactly the effect of coupling to the nuclear degrees of freedom and any external fields. Here we study the exact potential acting on the electron in charge-resonance enhanced ionization in a model one-dimensional H2+ molecule. We show there can be significant differences between the exact potential and that used in the traditional quasistatic analyses, arising from nonadiabatic coupling to the nuclear system, and that these are crucial to include for accurate simulations of time-resolved ionization dynamics and predictions of the ionization yield.