Helicity-Selective Enhancement and Polarization Control of Attosecond High Harmonic Waveforms Driven by Bichromatic Circularly Polarized Laser Fields

Kevin M. Dorney, Jennifer L. Ellis, Carlos Hernández-García, Daniel D. Hickstein, Christopher A. Mancuso, Nathan Brooks, Tingting Fan, Guangyu Fan, Dmitriy Zusin, Christian Gentry, Patrik Grychtol, Henry C. Kapteyn, and Margaret M. Murnane
Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 063201 – Published 8 August 2017
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Abstract

High harmonics driven by two-color counterrotating circularly polarized laser fields are a unique source of bright, circularly polarized, extreme ultraviolet, and soft x-ray beams, where the individual harmonics themselves are completely circularly polarized. Here, we demonstrate the ability to preferentially select either the right or left circularly polarized harmonics simply by adjusting the relative intensity ratio of the bichromatic circularly polarized driving laser field. In the frequency domain, this significantly enhances the harmonic orders that rotate in the same direction as the higher-intensity driving laser. In the time domain, this helicity-dependent enhancement corresponds to control over the polarization of the resulting attosecond waveforms. This helicity control enables the generation of circularly polarized high harmonics with a user-defined polarization of the underlying attosecond bursts. In the future, this technique should allow for the production of bright highly elliptical harmonic supercontinua as well as the generation of isolated elliptically polarized attosecond pulses.

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  • Received 23 February 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.063201

© 2017 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Atomic, Molecular & Optical

Authors & Affiliations

Kevin M. Dorney1,*, Jennifer L. Ellis1, Carlos Hernández-García2, Daniel D. Hickstein1, Christopher A. Mancuso1, Nathan Brooks1, Tingting Fan1, Guangyu Fan3, Dmitriy Zusin1, Christian Gentry1, Patrik Grychtol1, Henry C. Kapteyn1, and Margaret M. Murnane1

  • 1JILA, Department of Physics, University of Colorado Boulder and NIST, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA
  • 2Grupo de Investigación en Aplicaciones del Láser y Fotónica, Departamento de Física Aplicada, University of Salamanca, E-37008 Salamanca, Spain
  • 3Photonics Institute, Vienna University of Technology, A-1040 Vienna, Austria

  • *Corresponding author. kevin.dorney@colorado.edu

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Issue

Vol. 119, Iss. 6 — 11 August 2017

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