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Coherent superposition of electronic states induces attosecond electron motion in molecules. We theoretically investigate the strong-field ionization of this superposition state by numerically solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. In the obtained photoelectron momentum distribution, an intriguing bifurcation structure appears in the strong-field holographic interference pattern. We demonstrate that this bifurcation structure directly provides complete information about the status of the transient wave function of the superposition state: the horizontal location of the bifurcation in the momentum distribution reveals the relative phase of the involved components of the superposition state and the vertical position indicates the relative coefficient. Thus, this bifurcation structure takes a snapshot of the transient electron wave packet of the superposition state and provides an intuitive way to monitor electron motion in molecules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the classical ensemble method, we have investigated double ionization (DI) of stretched molecules by circularly polarized laser pulses. Back analysis of the DI trajectories shows that most DI occurs through a process of collision, indicating the nonsequential feature of DI. In contrast to the common recollision picture for nonsequential double ionization, here the first electron ionizes over the inner potential barrier of the molecule, moves directly towards the other nucleus and leads to excitation or ionization of the second electron by collision. The correlated momentum distributions for the electron pairs from this collision-induced nonsequential process show an obvious correlation pattern in the direction parallel to the molecular axis, whereas they show an anticorrelation pattern in the direction perpendicular to the molecular axis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]