A three step model for high harmonic generation from impurities in solids is developed. The process is found to be similar to high harmonic generation in atomic and molecular gases with the main difference coming from the non-parabolic nature of the bands. This opens a new avenue for strong field atomic and molecular physics in the condensed matter phase. As a first application, our conceptual study demonstrates the feasibility of tomographic measurement of impurity orbitals.
Using dynamical Hartree-Fock mean-field theory, we study the high-harmonic generation (HHG) in the fullerene molecules C$_{60}$ and C$_{70}$ under strong pump wave driving. We consider a strong-field regime and show that the output harmonic radiation exhibits multiple plateaus, whose borders are defined by the molecular excitonic lines and cutoff energies within each plateau scale linearly with the field strength amplitude. In contrast to atomic cases for the fullerene molecule, with the increase of the pump wave photon energy the cutoff harmonic energy is increased. We also show that with the increase of the electron-electron interaction energy overall the HHG rate is suppressed. We demonstrate that the C$_{70}$ molecule shows richer HHG spectra and a stronger high-harmonic intensity than the C$_{60}$.
High-harmonic generation (HHG) from a compact, solid-state medium is highly desirable for applications such as coherent attosecond pulse generation and extreme ultra-violet (EUV) spectroscopy, yet the typically weak conversion of pump light to HHG can largely hinder its applications. Here, we use a material operating in its epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) region, where the real part of its permittivity vanishes, to greatly boost the efficiency of the HHG process at the microscopic level. In experiments, we report high-harmonic emission up to the 9th order directly from a low-loss, solid-state ENZ medium: indium-doped cadmium oxide, with an excitation intensity at the GW cm-2 level. Furthermore, the observed HHG signal exhibits a pronounced spectral red-shift as well as linewidth broadening, resulting from the photo-induced electron heating and the consequent time-dependent resonant frequency of the ENZ film. Our results provide a novel nanophotonic platform for strong field physics, reveal new degrees of freedom for spectral and temporal control of HHG, and open up possibilities of compact solid-state attosecond light sources.
High-order harmonic generation (HHG) in isolated atoms and molecules has been widely utilized in extreme ultraviolet (XUV) photonics and attosecond pulse metrology. Recently, HHG has also been observed in solids, which could lead to important applications such as all-optical methods to image valance charge density and reconstruction of electronic band structures, as well as compact XUV light sources. Previous HHG studies are confined on crystalline solids; therefore decoupling the respective roles of long-range periodicity and high density has been challenging. Here, we report the first observation of HHG from amorphous fused silica. We decouple the role of long-range periodicity by comparing with crystal quartz, which contains same atomic constituents but exhibits long-range periodicity. Our results advance current understanding of strong-field processes leading to high harmonic generation in solids with implications in robust and compact coherent XUV light sources.
By using the Floquet eigenstates, we derive a formula to calculate the high-harmonic components of the electric current (HHC) in the setup where a monochromatic laser field is turned on at some time. On the basis of this formulation, we study the HHC spectrum of electrons on a one-dimensional chain with the staggered potential to study the effect of multiple sites in the unit cell such as the systems with charge density wave (CDW) order. With the help of the solution for the Floquet eigenstates, we analytically show that two plateaus of different origins emerge in the HHC spectrum. The widths of these plateaus are both proportional to the field amplitude, but inversely proportional to the laser frequency and its square, respectively. We also show numerically that multi-step plateaus appear when both the field amplitude and the staggered potential are strong.
We study the high harmonic generation (HHG) in Mott insulators using Floquet dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). We show that the main origin of the HHG in Mott insulators is the doublon-holon recombination, and that the character of the HHG spectrum differs depending on the field strength. In the weaker-field regime, the HHG spectrum shows a single plateau as in the HHG from gases, and its cut-off energy $epsilon_{rm cut}$ scales linearly with the field strength $E_0$ as $epsilon_{rm cut}=Delta_{rm gap} + alpha E_0$, where $Delta_{rm gap}$ is the Mott gap. On the other hand, in the stronger-field regime, multiple plateaus emerge and the $m$-th cut-off scales as $epsilon_{rm cut,m}=U + m E_0$. We show that this difference originates from the different dynamics of the doublons and holons in the weak- and strong-field regimes. We also comment on the similarities and differences between HHG from Mott insulators and from semiconductors. This proceedings paper complements our recent work, Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 057405 (2018), with additional results and analyses.