Understanding attosecond streaking

Abstract This tutorial provides an overview on the theory of attosecond streaking, a pump-probe scheme to extract timing information of ionization processes that has been widely used in the past decade. Emphasis is put on the origin of the Coulomb-laser-coupling (CLC) term, which is crucial in the interpretation of streaking delays. Having gained a proper understanding of how the CLC terms in various publications relate to each other, we will be able to analyze in which regime the streaking delay can be split into a measurement-induced CLC term and a `pure' ionization delay and under which conditions this splitting may break down. Thus we address the long-standing question of the validity of the widely applied interpretation of the streaking delay as a sum of the CLC term and a `pure' ionization delay.