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Register a new userPhase-matching mechanism for high-harmonic generation in the overdriven regime driven by few-cycle laser pulses
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Added by
Johannes Sch\\\"otz
Publication date
2019
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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Isolated attosecond pulses (IAPs) produced through laser-driven high-harmonic generation (HHG) hold promise for unprecedented insight into biological processes via attosecond x-ray diffraction with tabletop sources. However, efficient scaling of HHG towards x-ray energies has been hampered by ionization-induced plasma generation impeding the coherent buildup of high-harmonic radiation. Recently, it has been shown that these limitations can be overcome in the so-called overdriven regime where ionization loss and plasma dispersion strongly modify the driving laser pulse over small distances, albeit without demonstrating IAPs. Here, we report on experiments comparing the generation of IAPs in argon and neon at 80 eV via attosecond streaking measurements. Contrasting our experimental results with numerical simulations, we conclude that IAPs in argon are generated through ionization-induced transient phase-matching gating effective over distances on the order of 100 $mu$m. We show that the decay of the intensity and blue-shift due to plasma defocussing are crucial for allowing phase-matching close to the XUV cutoff at high plasma densities. We perform simulations for different gases and wavelengths and show that the mechanism is important for the phase-matching of long-wavelength, tightly-focused laser beams in high-pressure gas targets, which are currently being employed for scaling isolated attosecond pulse generation to x-ray photon energies.
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In this work we study the impact of chromatic focusing of few-cycle laser pulses on high-order harmonic generation (HHG) through analysis of the emitted extreme ultraviolet (XUV) radiation. Chromatic focusing is usually avoided in the few-cycle regime, as the pulse spatio-temporal structure may be highly distorted by the spatiotemporal aberrations. Here, however, we demonstrate it as an additional control parameter to modify the generated XUV radiation. We present experiments where few-cycle pulses are focused by a singlet lens in a Kr gas jet. The chromatic distribution of focal lengths allows us to tune HHG spectra by changing the relative singlet-target distance. Interestingly, we also show that the degree of chromatic aberration needed to this control does not degrade substantially the harmonic conversion efficiency, still allowing for the generation of supercontinua with the chirped-pulse scheme, demonstrated previously for achromatic focussing. We back up our experiments with theoretical simulations reproducing the experimental HHG results depending on diverse parameters (input pulse spectral phase, pulse duration, focus position) and proving that, under the considered parameters, the attosecond pulse train remains very similar to the achromatic case, even showing cases of isolated attosecond pulse generation for near single-cycle driving pulses.
The ongoing development of intense high-harmonic generation (HHG) sources has recently enabled highly nonlinear ionization of atoms by the absorption of at least 10 extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) photons within a single atom [Senfftleben textit{et al.}, arXiv1911.01375]. Here we investigate the role that reshaping of the fundamental, few-cycle, near-infrared (NIR) driving laser within the 30-cm-long HHG Xe medium plays in the generation of the intense HHG pulses. Using an incident NIR intensity that is higher than what is required for phase-matched HHG, signatures of reshaping are found by measuring the NIR blueshift and the fluorescence from the HHG medium along the propagation axis. These results are well reproduced by numerical calculations that show temporal compression of the NIR pulses in the HHG medium. The simulations predict that after refocusing an XUV beam waist radius of 320 nm and a clean attosecond pulse train can be obtained in the focal plane, with an estimated XUV peak intensity of 9x10^15 W/cm^2. Our results show that XUV intensities that were previously only available at large-scale facilities can now be obtained using moderately powerful table-top light sources.
We analyze the role of the difference between the central frequencies of the spectral distributions of the vector potential and the electric field of a short laser pulse. The frequency shift arises when the electric field is determined as the derivative of the vector potential to ensure that both quantities vanish at the beginning and end of the pulse. We derive an analytical estimate of the frequency shift and show how it affects various light induced processes, such as excitation, ionization and high harmonic generation. Since observables depend on the frequency spectrum of the electric field, the shift should be taken into account when setting the central frequency of the vector potential to avoid potential misinterpretation of numerical results for processes induced by few-cycle pulses.
Sources of intense, ultra-short electromagnetic pulses enable applications such as attosecond pulse generation, control of electron motion in solids and the observation of reaction dynamics at the electronic level. For such applications both high-intensity and carrier envelope phase~(CEP) tunability are beneficial, yet hard to obtain with current methods. In this work we present a new scheme for generation of isolated CEP-tunable intense sub-cycle pulses with central frequencies that range from the midinfrared to the ultraviolet. It utilizes an intense laser pulse which drives a wake in a plasma, co-propagating with a long-wavelength seed pulse. The moving electron density spike of the wake amplifies the seed and forms a sub-cycle pulse. Controlling the CEP of the seed pulse, or the delay between driver and seed leads to CEP-tunability, while frequency tunability can be achieved by adjusting the laser and plasma parameters. Our 2D and 3D Particle-In-Cell simulations predict laser-to-sub-cycle-pulse conversion efficiencies up to 1%, resulting in relativistically intense sub-cycle pulses.
High harmonic generation driven by femtosecond lasers makes it possible to capture the fastest dynamics in molecules and materials. However, to date the shortest attosecond (as) pulses have been produced only in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) region of the spectrum below 100 eV, which limits the range of materials and molecular systems that can be explored. Here we use advanced experiment and theory to demonstrate a remarkable convergence of physics: when mid-infrared lasers are used to drive the high harmonic generation process, the conditions for optimal bright soft X-ray generation naturally coincide with the generation of isolated attosecond pulses. The temporal window over which phase matching occurs shrinks rapidly with increasing driving laser wavelength, to the extent that bright isolated attosecond pulses are the norm for 2 mu m driving lasers. Harnessing this realization, we demonstrate the generation of isolated soft X-ray attosecond pulses at photon energies up to 180 eV for the first time, that emerge as linearly chirped 300 as pulses with a transform limit of 35 as. Most surprisingly, we find that in contrast to as pulse generation in the EUV, long-duration, multi-cycle, driving laser pulses are required to generate isolated soft X-ray bursts efficiently, to mitigate group velocity walk-off between the laser and the X-ray fields that otherwise limit the conversion efficiency. Our work demonstrates a clear and straightforward approach for robustly generating bright attosecond pulses of electromagnetic radiation throughout the soft X ray region of the spectrum.
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