Revealing the effect of atomic orbitals on the phase distribution of an ionizing electron wave packet with circularly...

We theoretically study the interference of photoelectrons released from atomic p_± orbitals in co-rotating and counter-rotating circularly polarized two-color laser pulses consisting of a strong 400-nm field and a weak 800-nm field. We find that in co-rotating fields the interference fringes in the photoelectron momentum distributions are nearly the same for p_± orbitals, while in counter-rotating fields the interference fringes for p₊ and p_- orbitals oscillate out of phase with respect to the electron emission angle. The simulations based on the strong-field approximation show a good agreement with the numerical solutions of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. We find that different phase distributions of the electron wave packets emitted from p₊ and p_- orbitals can be easily revealed by the counter-rotating circularly polarized two-color laser fields. We further show that the photoelectron interference patterns in the circularly polarized two-color laser fields record the time differences of the electron wave packets released within an optical cycle.