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We investigate the above-threshold ionization of an atom in a combined infrared (IR) and extreme ultraviolet (XUV) two-color laser field and focus on the role of XUV field in the high-order above-threshold ionization (HATI) process. It is demonstrated that, in stark contrast to previous studies, the XUV laser may play a significant role in atomic HATI process, and in particular, the XUV laser can accelerate the ionized electron in a quantized way during the collision between the electron and its parent ion. This process cannot be explained by the classical three-step model. Our results indicate that the previously well-established concept that HATI is an elastic recollision process is broken down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the backward propagation of acoustic waves, the direction of phase velocity is anti-parallel to that of group velocity. We propose a scheme to manipulate the backward propagation using a periodical structure. The dynamic backward propagation process is further experimentally observed. It is demonstrated that the oblique incident plane wave moves backward when it travels through the periodical structure and the backward shift can be controlled within a certain range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We experimentally investigate the double ionization of molecular hydrogen subjected to ultrashort intense laser pulses. The total kinetic energy release of the two coincident H+ ions, which provides a diagnosis of different processes to double ionization of H2, is measured for two different pulse durations, i.e., 25 and 5 fs, and various laser intensities. It is found that, for the long pulse duration (i.e., 25 fs), the double ionization occurs mainly via two processes, i.e., the charge resonance enhanced ionization and recollision-induced double ionization. Moreover, the contributions from these two processes can be significantly modulated by changing the laser intensity. In contrast, for a few-cycle pulse of 5 fs, only the recollsion-induced double ionization survives, and in particular, this process could be solely induced by the first-return recollision at appropriate laser intensities, providing an efficient way to probe the sub-laser-cycle molecular dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We experimentally investigate above-threshold ionization of xenon subject to chirped intense laser pulses. While for few-cycle laser pulses free of chirp, the Freeman resonance narrow peaks in the photoelectron spectra become strongly suppressed, they will re-emerge for laser pulses with a certain chirp. Moreover, the position of the resonant peaks exhibits a strong dependence on the direction of the chirp. The experimental features can be understood by a two-step ionization process; that is, a multi-photon excitation plus subsequent ionization process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distribution of speed of sound (SOS) in biomedical tissue and delay compensation (DC) have significant impact on the image quality of photoacoustic tomography (PAT). When imaging human peripheral joints, using fixed SOS and DC can only ensure that the reconstructed images are focused in a limited depth range, whereas they are defocused at other depths, which cause severe artifacts and blurring. In this work, a linear-DC based reconstruction approach is proposed to focus the whole PAT image region. It is proved by two in vivo experiments that, compared with traditional delay-and-sum back projection algorithms, the proposed method can effectively optimize the image quality of articular tissues in PAT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]