We theoretically investigate the piezo-optic effect of high-harmonic generation (HHG) in shear-strained semiconductors. By focusing on a typical semiconductor, GaAs, we show that there is optical activity, meaning different responses to right-handed and left-handed elliptically polarized electric fields. We also show that this optical activity is more pronounced for higher harmonics whose perturbative order exceeds the band-gap energy. These findings point to a useful pathway for strain engineering of nonlinear optics to control the reciprocity of HHG.
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