Half-Cycle Pulse Assisted Electron-Ion Recombination

Unipolar “half-cycle” electric field pulses (HCPs) have been used to recombine free electrons and calcium ions. The field assisted process is very similar to controlled three-body recombination in plasmas. We report on experiments that utilize HCP assisted recombination to probe the probability distribution of continuum electron wave packets and produce bound wave packets that are highly localized in three spatial dimensions.