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The effect of the Pauli exclusion principle on double ionization of He atoms by strong, linearly polarized laser pulses is analyzed. We show that correlated electron escape, with electron momenta symmetric with respect to the field polarization axis, is suppressed if atoms are initially prepared in the metastable state 3S. The effect is a consequence of selection rules for the transition to the appropriate outgoing two-electron states. We illustrate the suppression in numerical calculations of electron and ion momentum distributions within a reduced dimensionality model. |