A single-electron approach for many-electron dynamics in high-order harmonic generation

Abstract: We present a novel ab-initio single-electron approach to correlated electron dynamics in strong laser fields. By writing the electronic wavefunction as a product of a marginal one-electron wavefunction and a conditional wavefunction, we show that the exact harmonic spectrum can be obtained from a single-electron Schr\"odinger equation. To obtain the one-electron potential in practice, we propose an adiabatic approximation, i.e. a potential is generated that depends only on the position of one electron. This potential, together with the laser interaction, is then used to obtain the dynamics of the system. For a model Helium atom in a laser field, we show that by using our approach, the high-order harmonic generation spectrum can be obtained to a good approximation.