No Arabic abstract
High harmonic generation (HHG) is an extreme nonlinear frequency up-conversion process during which extremely short duration optical pulses at very short wavelengths are emitted. A major concern of HHG is the small conversion efficiency at the single emitter level. Thus ensuring that the emission at different locations are emitted in phase is crucial. At high pump intensities it is impossible to phase match the radiation without reverting to ordered modulations of either the medium or the pump field itself, a technique known as Quasi-Phase-Matching (QPM). To date, demonstrated QPM techniques of HHG were usually complicated and/or lacked tunability. Here we demonstrate experimentally a relatively simple, highly and easily tunable QPM technique by using a structured pump beam made of the interference of different spatial optical modes. With this technique we demonstrate on-the-fly, tunable quasi-phase-matching of harmonic orders 25 to 39 with up to 30 fold enhancement of the emission.
A new method to generate and control the amplitude and phase distributions of a optical vortex beam is proposed. By introducing a holographic grating on top of the dielectric waveguide, the free space vortex beam and the in-plane guiding wave can be converted to each other. This microscale holographic grating is very robust against the variation of geometry parameters. The designed vortex beam generator can produce the target beam with a fidelity up to 0.93, and the working bandwidth is about 175 nm with the fidelity larger than 0.80. In addition, a multiple generator composed of two holographic gratings on two parallel waveguides are studied, which can perform an effective and flexible modulation on the vortex beam by controlling the phase of the input light. Our work opens a new avenue towards the integrated OAM devices with multiple degrees of optical freedom, which can be used for optical tweezers, micronano imaging, information processing, and so on.
The interplay between spin and orbital angular momentum in the up-conversion process allows us to control the macroscopic wave front of high harmonics by manipulating the microscopic polarizations of the driving field. We demonstrate control of orbital angular momentum in high harmonic generation from both solid and gas phase targets using the selection rules of spin angular momentum. The gas phase harmonics extend the control of angular momentum to extreme-ultraviolet wavelength. We also propose a bi-color scheme to produce spectrally separated extreme-ultraviolet radiation carrying orbital angular momentum.
High-harmonic generation (HHG), which is generation of multiple optical harmonic light, is an unconventional nonlinear optical phenomenon beyond perturbation regime. HHG, which was initially observed in gaseous media, has recently been demonstrated in solid state materials. How to control the extreme nonlinear optical phenomena is a challenging subject. Compared to atomic gases, solid state materials have advantages in controlling electronic structures and carrier injection. Here, we demonstrate control of HHG by tuning electronic structure and carrier injection using single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs). We reveal systematic changes in the high-harmonic spectra of SWCNTs with a series of electronic structures from a metal to a semiconductor. We demonstrate enhancement or reduction of harmonic generation by more than one order of magnitude by tuning electron and hole injection into the semiconductor SWCNTs through electrolyte gating. These results open a way to control HHG within the concept of field effect transistor devices.
The extreme nonlinear optical process of high-harmonic generation (HHG) makes it possible to map the properties of a laser beam onto a radiating electron wavefunction, and in turn, onto the emitted x-ray light. Bright HHG beams typically emerge from a longitudinal phased distribution of atomic-scale quantum antennae. Here, we form a transverse necklace-shaped phased array of HHG emitters, where orbital angular momentum conservation allows us to tune the line spacing and divergence properties of extreme-ultraviolet and soft X-ray high harmonic combs. The on-axis HHG emission has extremely low divergence, well below that obtained when using Gaussian driving beams, which further decreases with harmonic order. This work provides a new degree of freedom for the design of harmonic combs, particularly in the soft X-ray regime, where very limited options are available. Such harmonic beams can enable more sensitive probes of the fastest correlated charge and spin dynamics in molecules, nanoparticles and materials.
Efficient frequency conversion techniques are crucial to the development of plasmonic metasurfaces for information processing and signal modulation. In principle, nanoscale electric-field confinement in nonlinear materials enables higher harmonic conversion efficiencies per unit volume than those attainable in bulk materials. Here we demonstrate efficient second-harmonic generation (SHG) in a serrated nanogap plasmonic geometry that generates steep electric field gradients on a dielectric metasurface. An ultrafast pump is used to control plasmon-induced electric fields in a thin-film material with inversion symmetry that, without plasmonic enhancement, does not exhibit an an even-order nonlinear optical response. The temporal evolution of the plasmonic near-field is characterized with ~100as resolution using a novel nonlinear interferometric technique. The ability to manipulate nonlinear signals in a metamaterial geometry as demonstrated here is indispensable both to understanding the ultrafast nonlinear response of nanoscale materials, and to producing active, optically reconfigurable plasmonic devices