Transient spectroscopy from time-dependent electronic-structure theory without multipole expansions

Based on the work done by an electromagnetic field on an atomic or molecular electronic system, a general gauge-invariant formulation of transient absorption spectroscopy is presented within the semiclassical approximation. Avoiding multipole expansions, a computationally viable expression for the spectral response function is derived from the minimal-coupling Hamiltonian of an electronic system interacting with one or more laser pulses described by a source-free, enveloped electromagnetic vector potential. With a fixed-basis expansion of the electronic wave function, the computational cost of simulations of laser-driven electron dynamics beyond the dipole approximation is the same as simulations adopting the dipole approximation. We illustrate the theory by time-dependent configuration interaction and coupled-cluster simulations of core-level absorption and circular dichroism spectra.