MULTICOINCIDENCE MEASUREMENTS OF DOUBLE PHOTOIONIZATION IN HELIUM

A new toroidal analyser has been used to study the double photoionization of helium, for energies down to 4 eV above threshold. The two electrons are detected with equal energies, and coincidences between them for various angles of emission can be obtained simultaneously. The plane of detection contains the photon beam, in contrast with recent experiments performed in the plane perpendicular to the photon beam. The angular correlation function is extracted directly from the present measurements, which are shown to be insensitive to the Stokes parameters of the photon beam. The width of that function is not observed to vary significantly from 4 eV to 17.6 eV above threshold.