In the strong field molecular tunneling ionization theory of Tong et al. [Phys. Rev. A 66, 033402 (2002)], the ionization rate depends on the asymptotic wave function of the molecular orbital from which the electron is removed. The orbital wave functions obtained from standard quantum chemistry packages in general are not good enough in the asymptotic region. Here we construct a one-electron model potential for several linear molecules using density functional theory. We show that the asymptotic wave function can be improved with an iteration method and after one iteration accurate asymptotic wave functions and structure parameters are determined. With the new parameters we examine the alignment-dependent tunneling ionization probabilities for several molecules and compare with other calculations and with recent measurements, including ionization from inner molecular orbitals.

An efficient method to generate a short attosecond pulse is presented by using intense few-cycle shaped infrared (ir) laser in combination with an ultraviolet (uv) attosecond (as) pulse. We show that high-order harmonic generation (HHG) plateau near the cutoff is enhanced by one order of magnitude compared with the shaped laser case and the HHG supercontinuum spectrum is generated by adding a uv attosecond pulse to the few-cycle shaped ir laser at a proper time. By enhancing the long quantum path and suppressing the short one corresponding to one major return, an isolated 57-as pulse with a bandwidth of $62\mathrm{eV}$ is obtained directly. The time-frequency characteristics of the HHG are analyzed in detail by means of the wavelet transform of the time-dependent induced dipole acceleration. In addition, we also perform classical trajectory simulation of the strong-field electron dynamics and electron return map.

The interaction of an intense laser pulse with atoms and molecules depends extremely nonlinearly on the laser intensity. Yet experimentally there still exists no simple reliable methods for determining the peak laser intensity within the focused volume. Here we present a simple method, based on an improved Perelomov-Popov-Terent'ev model, that would allow the calibration of laser intensities from the measured ionization signals of atoms or molecules. The model is first examined by comparing ionization probabilities (or signals) of atoms and several simple diatomic molecules with those from solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. We then show the possibility of using this method to calibrate laser intensities for atoms, diatomic molecules as well as large polyatomic molecules, for laser intensities from the multiphoton ionization to tunneling ionization regimes.

We analyzed the discrepancy of the angular dependence of strong-field ionization for ${\text{CO}}_2$ among the different theoretical calculations and experiments. Using a more accurate ground-state wave function of ${\text{CO}}_2$ in the asymptotic region, we showed that the accuracy in the earlier tunneling ionization theory of Tong et al. [Phys. Rev. A 66, 033402 (2002)] is much improved. We also concluded that the angular dependence deduced from the experiment of Pavičić et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 243001 (2007)] appears to be too narrowly distributed.

We theoretically investigate the high-order-harmonic generation (HHG) from the oriented gas-phase CO molecule exposed to the combination of an intense few-cycle chirped laser and a unipolar pulse. We show that the HHG is dramatically extended and an ultrabroad extreme ultraviolet supercontinuum spectra in the plateau is generated by adding a unipolar pulse to the few-cycle chirped laser at a proper time. Both the classical trajectory simulation and quantum time-frequency analysis show that a dominant short quantum path is selected to contribute the HHG spectra in the plateau. By superposing the supercontinuum harmonics centered at several different central frequencies, we can directly produce several isolated pulses in which the shortest one achieves 38 as.