Envelope-Driven Recollisions Triggered by an Elliptically Polarized Pulse

Increasing ellipticity usually suppresses the recollision probability drastically. In contrast, we report on a recollision channel with large return energy and a substantial probability, regardless of the ellipticity. The laser envelope plays a dominant role in the energy gained by the electron, and in the conditions under which the electron comes back to the core. We show that this recollision channel efficiently triggers various nonlinear and nonperturbative phenomena-such as multiple ionization-with an elliptically polarized pulse.