Abstract. We investigate numerically the photionization of diamond irradiated by 800 nm intense 30fs laser pulse. We find that ionization depends sensitively on the characteristics of the substrate band structure and that the electron yield changes non-monotonically with the increase of the laser intensity. For low intensity of the light pulse I ∼ 10¹² W/cm², we find that carrier generation occurs via absorption of 9 photons. When the intensity of the laser pulse is higher than 5×10¹³ W/cm², the creation of electron-hole pairs is highly efficient resulting in carrier densities exceeding the critical density n ∼ 10²⁰ cm^-3 for dielectric breakdown of bulk diamond.

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