Pulse-duration effect in nonsequential double ionization of Ar atoms

Nonsequential double ionization of Ar atoms in intense few-cycle laser pulses is studied by a classical ensemble method. The laser pulses are of trapezoidal shape with one cycle in both ramp on and ramp off. We obtain the cycle-resolved electron dynamics by increasing the optical cycles in the laser pulse one by one. We find that, at the higher laser intensity, the correlated-electron momentum distribution (CMD) in the three-cycle laser pulse exhibits two predominate structures in the first and third quadrants. They are formed by the electron pairs in which the second electron is knocked out by the returning electron in the second cycle. As the pulse duration increases, more electron pairs accumulate in the second and fourth quadrants of the CMDs. In these electron pairs, the second electron is first excited owing to collision with the returning electron and then is ionized by the laser field. By varying the peak intensity, we show the transition of the CMDs from anticorrelation to correlation in three-cycle laser pulses, which disproves that multiple collisions cause the transition.