Minimizing the duration of isolated attosecond pulses

Authors

Dian Peng, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Anthony F. Starace, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Hua-Chieh Shao, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow
Jean Marcel Ngoko Djiokap, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

ORCID IDs

Dian Peng https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7016-9520

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2020

Citation

PHYSICAL REVIEW A 102, 063126 (2020)

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.102.063126

Comments

©2020 American Physical Society. Used by permission.

Abstract

We investigate theoretically how the duration of an isolated attosecond pulse (IAP) can be minimized by carefully selecting frequencies of high-order harmonic generation (HHG) spectra produced by ultrashort driving laser pulses. Based on numerical calculations of HHG by solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation for a single H atom, we provide three strategies for generating shorter IAPs. First, when the high-frequency region of an HHG plateau is selected one should use frequencies below the cutoff. Second, for a wide HHG plateau the low-frequency region can produce shorter IAPs than the high-frequency region. Third, we propose a method of producing IAPs with transform-limited duration by selecting special frequency stripes across the entire HHG plateau. Analytic analyses show that how our strategies work is related to the (Fourier-transform) properties of an Airy function. We also carry out HHG calculations considering macroscopic effects by means of intensity averaging over the focal region. We find that our conclusions for single-atom calculations can still apply for macroscopic HHG spectra as long as they resemble single-atom spectra.