Ionization of atomic hydrogen in strong infrared laser fields

We have used the matrix iteration method of Nurhuda and Faisal [Phys. Rev. A 60, 3125 (1999)] to treat ionization of atomic hydrogen by a strong laser pulse. After testing our predictions against a variety of previous calculations, we present ejected-electron spectra as well as angular distributions for few-cycle infrared laser pulses with peak intensities of up to 10¹⁵ W/cm². It is shown that the convergence of the results with the number of partial waves is a serious issue, which can be managed in a satisfactory way by using the velocity form of the electric dipole operator in connection with an efficient time-propagation scheme.