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- Arnold, Cord L., et al.
(author)
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Spatiotemporal coupling of attosecond pulses
- 2019
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In: 2019 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe and European Quantum Electronics Conference, CLEO/Europe-EQEC 2019. - 9781728104690 ; Part F140-CLEO_Europe 2019
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Attosecond pulses in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) spectral range are today routinely generated via high-order harmonic generation (HHG), when intense ultrashort laser pulses are focused into a gaseous generation medium. The effect is most easily understood in a semi-classical picture [1]. An electron can tunnel ionize from the distorted atomic potential, pick up kinetic energy in the laser field, potentially return to its parent ion and recombine. The excess energy is emitted as XUV photon. The process repeats for every half-cycle of the driving field, resulting in a train of attosecond pulses and in the frequency domain in the well-known, odd-order comb of harmonics. Two main families of electron trajectories leading to the same photon energy can be distinguished into 'short' and 'long', according to their time of travel in the continuum. Due to the complicated nature of the HHG process, attosecond pulses usually cannot be separated into their temporal and spatial profiles, but instead have strong chromatic aberration and are spatio-temporally coupled [2-4].
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| 2. |
- Wikmark, Hampus, et al.
(author)
-
Spatiotemporal coupling of attosecond pulses
- 2019
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In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. - : Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - 0027-8424. ; 116:11, s. 4779-4787
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The shortest light pulses produced to date are of the order of a few tens of attoseconds, with central frequencies in the extreme UV range and bandwidths exceeding tens of electronvolts. They are often produced as a train of pulses separated by half the driving laser period, leading in the frequency domain to a spectrum of high, odd-order harmonics. As light pulses become shorter and more spectrally wide, the widely used approximation consisting of writing the optical waveform as a product of temporal and spatial amplitudes does not apply anymore. Here, we investigate the interplay of temporal and spatial properties of attosecond pulses. We show that the divergence and focus position of the generated harmonics often strongly depend on their frequency, leading to strong chromatic aberrations of the broadband attosecond pulses. Our argument uses a simple analytical model based on Gaussian optics, numerical propagation calculations, and experimental harmonic divergence measurements. This effect needs to be considered for future applications requiring highquality focusing while retaining the broadband/ultrashort characteristics of the radiation.
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