No Arabic abstract
Resonant enhancement of high harmonic generation can be obtained in plasmas containing ions with strong radiative transitions resonant with harmonic orders. The mechanism for this enhancement is still debated. We perform the first temporal characterization of the attosecond emission from a tin plasma under near-resonant conditions for two different resonance detunings. We show that the resonance considerably changes the relative phase of neighbouring harmonics. For very small detunings, their phase locking may even be lost, evidencing strong phase distortions in the emission process and a modified attosecond structure. These features are well reproduced by our simulations, allowing their interpretation in terms of the phase of the recombination dipole moment.
We study the photoionization of argon atoms close to the 3s$^2$3p$^6$ $rightarrow$ 3s$^1$3p$^6$4p $leftrightarrow$ 3s$^2$3p$^5$ $varepsilon ell$, $ell$=s,d Fano window resonance. An interferometric technique using an attosecond pulse train, i.e. a frequency comb in the extreme ultraviolet range, and a weak infrared probe field allows us to study both amplitude and phase of the photoionization probability amplitude as a function of photon energy. A theoretical calculation of the ionization process accounting for several continuum channels and bandwidth effects reproduces well the experimental observations and shows that the phase variation of the resonant two-photon amplitude depends on the interaction between the channels involved in the autoionization process.
We present experimental results showing the appearance of a near-continuum in the high-order harmonic generation (HHG) spectra of atomic and molecular species as the driving laser intensity of an infrared pulse increases. Detailed macroscopic simulations reveal that these near-continuum spectra are capable of producing IAPs in the far field if a proper spatial filter is applied. Further, our simulations show that the near-continuum spectra and the IAPs are a product of strong temporal and spatial reshaping (blue shift and defocusing) of the driving field. This offers a possibility of producing IAPs with a broad range of photon energy, including plateau harmonics, by mid-IR laser pulses even without carrier-envelope phase stabilization.
We show that high-order harmonics generated from molecules by intense laser pulses can be expressed as the product of a returning electron wave packet and the photo-recombination cross section (PRCS) where the electron wave packet can be obtained from simple strong-field approximation (SFA) or from a companion atomic target. Using these wave packets but replacing the PRCS obtained from SFA or from the atomic target by the accurate PRCS from molecules, the resulting HHG spectra are shown to agree well with the benchmark results from direct numerical solution of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation, for the case of H$_2^+$ in laser fields. The result illustrates that these powerful theoretical tools can be used for obtaining high-order harmonic spectra from molecules. More importantly, the results imply that the PRCS extracted from laser-induced HHG spectra can be used for time-resolved dynamic chemical imaging of transient molecules with temporal resolutions down to a few femtoseconds.
High-order harmonic generation by few-cycle 800 nm laser pulses in neon gas in the presence of a strong terahertz (THz) field is investigated numerically with propagation effects taken into account. Our calculations show that the combination of THz fields with up to 12 fs laser pulses can be an effective gating technique to generate single attosecond pulses. We show that in the presence of the strong THz field only a single attosecond burst can be phase matched, whereas radiation emitted during other half-cycles disappears during propagation. The cutoff is extended and a wide supercontinuum appears in the near-field spectra, extending the available spectral width for isolated attosecond pulse generation from 23 to 93 eV. We demonstrate that phase matching effects are responsible for the generation of isolated attosecond pulses, even in conditions when single atom response yields an attosecond pulse train.
Ultrafast processes in matter can be captured and even controlled by using sequences of few-cycle optical pulses, which need to be well characterized, both in amplitude and phase. The same degree of control has not yet been achieved for few-cycle extreme ultraviolet pulses generated by high-order harmonic generation in gases, with duration in the attosecond range. Here, we show that by varying the spectral phase and carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of a high-repetition rate laser, using dispersion in glass, we achieve a high degree of control of the relative phase and CEP between consecutive attosecond pulses. The experimental results are supported by a detailed theoretical analysis based upon the semiclassical three-step model for high-order harmonic generation.