Femtosecond Coulomb explosion imaging of vibrational wave functions

Because of the nonlinearity of multiphoton ionization, an intense 5 fs puls e is short enough to change the ionization probability from near zero to ne ar unity in less than one-half of a laser period. For H-2(+) this exposes a ll parts of the vibrational wave function to the full force of Coulomb repu lsion at nearly the same time. By solving the time dependent Schrodinger eq uation, following both electron and ion motion we show that the initial vib rational wave function Psi(R) of H-2(+) can be reconstructed by using Coulo mb's law to map the ion fragment kinetic energy spectrum into \Psi(R)\(2).