Breakdown of the Strong-Field Approximation for Transverse Electron Momentum Distributions in Strong-Field Ionization

We investigated the transverse electron momentum distributions for the strong field ionization of atoms by laser pulses with varying ellipticity. We investigated two ionization regimes; tunelling and over the barrier ionization regimes. The over the barrier regime was accessed by using neon atoms in excited atomic metastable states and is the first such strong-field experiment to use such an atomic species. We will show that the transverse momentum distributions evolve in qualitatively different when the ellipticity of the driving laser pulses is varied.