An approach of estimating excitation cross sections in multiphoton processes

We suggest a simple approach to roughly estimate the excitation cross sections of various steps in a multiphoton ionization (or dissociation) process by applying the measured dependence of product signal on laser intensity. The validity of this method is demonstrated theoretically by means of the rate equations based upon a two-step kinetic model and can, in principle, be extended to the multiphoton process with steps more than two. Some results of numerical test and experiment are quoted.