Hydrogen and helium exposed to an attosecond electric field pulse

The characteristics of excitation and ionization of atoms exposed to very short electric field pulses are different from what is known from the long pulse and continuous wave regimes. We investigate the effect of a linearly polarized short electric field pulse of 1-5 cycles applied to hydrogen and collinear helium quantum mechanically by solving the time-dependent Schroedinger equation by means of the split-operator fast Fourier transform method. After a few modifications, one can handle the singularities of the Coulomb potential and the electron-electron interaction term. Stimulated by a recent theoretical study of the hydrogen ground state based on the discrete variable representation, we shall check whether or not the initial states of hydrogen and, more interesting, collinear helium can be fully restored by using two alternating linearly polarized one-cycle pulses