Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

We demonstrate that exterior complex scaling (ECS) can be used to impose outgoing wave boundary conditions exactly on solutions of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation for atoms in intense electromagnetic pulses using finite grid methods. The procedure is formally exact when applied in the appropriate gauge and is demonstrated in a calculation of high harmonic generation in which multiphoton resonances are seen for long pulse durations. However, we also demonstrate that while the application of ECS in this way is formally exact, numerical error can appear for long time propagations that can only be controlled by extending the finite grid. A mathematical analysis of the origins of that numerical error, illustrated with an analytically solvable model, is also given.