Infinite-time surface flux for full-dimensional three-body breakup dynamics

Abstract

We derive an infinite-time surface-flux formulation for full-dimensional three-body breakup dynamics in intense laser fields. The method is designed as a post-pulse extension of time-dependent surface flux (tSurff) calculations for systems with two asymptotic fragments, with helium double ionization and dissociative ionization of $\hydroplus$ as representative applications. Standard tSurff calculations avoid projection on very large boxes, but the spectra still contain a field-free tail after the laser pulse; converging this tail by direct propagation can be expensive for slow particles, narrow resonances, and long-range Coulomb channels. Here the post-pulse time integrals are rewritten as resolvents of the field-free one-particle ionic Hamiltonians and of the full field-free three-body Hamiltonian. The resulting expressions separate the already available tSurff amplitudes from stationary correction terms that can be evaluated from saved wave functions in the inner and single-ionization regions. The formulation gives a common theoretical structure for electron-electron breakup in helium and electron-nuclear breakup in $\hydroplus$, and it is compatible with the spectral decompositions and MPI-parallel workflow of the tRecX framework. This provides a practical route to tSurff+iSurff calculations of correlated three-body spectra without long post-pulse propagation and without solving a large complex linear system independently for every final momentum.