No Arabic abstract
We report on an investigation of simultaneous generation of several narrow-bandwidth laser-like coherent emissions from nitrogen molecular ions ( ) produced in intense mid-infrared laser fields. With systematic examinations on the dependences of coherent emissions on gas pressure as well as several laser parameters including laser intensity, polarization and wavelength of the pump laser pulses, we reveal that the multiple coherent emission lines generated in originate from a series of nonlinear processes beginning with four-wave mixing, followed with stimulated Raman scattering. Our analyses further show that the observed nonlinear processes are greatly enhanced at the resonant wavelengths, giving rise to high conversion efficiencies from the infrared pump laser pulses to the coherent emission lines near the transition wavelengths between the different vibrational energy levels of ground X and that of the excited B states.
We perform a combined theoretical and experimental investigation of the superradiance in the quantum coherent system generated by strong laser fields. The semiclassical theory of superradiance that includes the superradiant temporal profile, character duration, time delay, intensity is derived. The experimental data and theoretical predictions of 391-nm forward emission as a function of nitrogen gas pressure are compared and show good agreement. Our results not only demonstrate that the time-delayed optical amplification inside the molecular nitrogen ions is superradiance, but also reveal the quantum optical properties of strong-field physics.
In present paper we develop an analytic theory for the harmonic generation of symmetric diatomic molecular ions beyond two-level model, emphasizing the influence of charge-resonance (CR) states those are strongly coupled to electromagnetic fields for large internuclear distance. With taking into account the continuum states that is ignored in the two-level model and become important for intense laser case, our model is capable to produce spectrum for the whole range of harmonic orders consisting of a molecular plateau due to the CR transition and an atomic-like plateau for a long-wavelength excitation, and in good agreement with numerical results from directly solution of the Schrodinger equation. Our theory also identifies the crucial role of the CR states in the fine structure of harmonic spectrum and shows that the harmonic generation in molecular system can be effectively controlled by adjusting the internuclear distance.
We experimentally investigate generation of molecular nitrogen-ion lasers with two femtosecond laser pulses at different wavelengths. The first pulse serves as the pump which ionizes the nitrogen molecules and excites the molecular ions to excited electronic states. The second pulse serves as the probe which leads to stimulated emission from the excited molecular ions. We observe that changing the angle between the polarization directions of the two pulses gives rise to elliptically polarized molecular nitrogen-ion laser fields, which is interpreted as a result of strong birefringence of the gain medium near the wavelengths of the molecular nitrogen-ion laser.
Transient near-fields around metallic nanotips drive many applications, including the generation of ultrafast electron pulses and their use in electron microscopy. We have investigated the electron emission from a gold nanotip driven by mid-infrared few-cycle laser pulses. We identify a low-energy peak in the kinetic energy spectrum and study its shift to higher energies with increasing laser intensities from $1.7$ to $3.7cdot10^{11} mathrm{W}/mathrm{cm}^2$. The experimental observation of the upshift of the low-energy peak is compared to a simple model and numerical simulations, which show that the decay of the near-field on a nanometer scale results in non-adiabatic transfer of the ponderomotive potential to the kinetic energy of emitted electrons and in turn to a shift of the peak. We derive an analytic expression for the non-adiabatic ponderomotive shift, which, after the previously found quenching of the quiver motion, completes the understanding of the role of inhomogeneous fields in strong-field photoemission from nanostructures.
We report generation of cascaded rotational Raman scattering up to 58th orders in coherently excited CO_2 molecules. The high-order Raman scattering, which produces a quasiperiodic frequency comb with more than 600 sidebands, is obtained using an intense femtosecond laser to impulsively excite rotational coherence and the femtosecond-laser-induced N_2^+ lasing to generate cascaded Raman signals. The novel configuration allows this experiment to be performed with a single femtosecond laser beam at free-space standoff locations. It is revealed that the efficient spectral extension of Raman signals is attributed to the specific spectra-temporal structures of N_2^+ lasing, the ideal spatial overlap of femtosecond laser and N2+ lasing, and the guiding effect of molecular alignment. The Raman spectrum extending above 2000 cm^-1 naturally corresponds to a femtosecond pulse train due to the periodic revivals of molecular rotational wavepackets.