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With the three-dimensional classical ensemble model, we investigate the correlated electron emission in nonsequential double ionization (NSDI) of argon atoms by few-cycle laser pulses. Our calculations well reproduce the experimentally observed cross-shaped structure in the correlated two-electron momentum spectrum [ Nature Commun. 3, 813 (2012)]. By tracing these NSDI trajectories, we find that besides the process of recollision-induced excitation with subsequent ionization just before the next field maximum, the recollision ionization also significantly contributes to the cross-shaped structure.

A novel compact dual-crystal optical parametric amplification (DOPA) scheme, collinearly pumped by a Ti:sapphire laser (0.8 μm), is theoretically investigated for efficiently generating broadband IR pulses at non-degenerate wavelengths (1.2 μm~1.4 μm and 1.8 μm~2.1 μm). By inserting a pair of barium fluoride (BaF(2)) wedges between two thin β-barium borate (BBO) crystals, the group velocity mismatch (GVM) between the three interacting pulses can be compensated simultaneously. In this case, the obtained signal spectrum centered at 1.3 μm is nearly 20% broader and the conversion efficiency is increased, but also the pulse contrast and beam quality are improved due to the better temporal overlap. Furthermore, sub-two-cycle idler pulses with carrier-envelope phase (CEP) fluctuation of sub-100-mrad root mean square (RMS) can be generated. Because a tunable few-cycle IR pulse with millijoule energy is attainable in this scheme, it will contribute to ultrafast community and be particularly useful as a driving or controlling field for the generation of ultrafast coherent x-ray supercontinuum.

We perform a quantum-orbit analysis for the dependence of high-order-harmonic yield on the driving field ellipticity and the polarization properties of the generated high harmonics. The electron trajectories responsible for the emission of particular harmonics are identified. It is found that, in elliptically polarized driving field, the electrons have ellipticity-dependent initial velocities, which lead to the decrease of the ionization rate. Thus the harmonic yield steeply decreases with laser ellipticity. Besides, we show that the polarization properties of the harmonics are related to the complex momenta of the electron. The physical origin of the harmonic ellipticity is interpreted as the consequence of quantum-mechanical uncertainty of the electron momentum. Our results are verified with the experimental results as well as the numerical solutions of the time dependent Schrödinger equation from the literature.

We propose an efficient method to generate an ultra-broadband supercontinuum by using a three-color field synthesized by a 1600 nm driving pulse and two weak (3200 nm and 400 nm) control pulses. The results show that the acceleration and ionization steps in the HHG process are simultaneously controlled in our scheme, which can not only broaden the bandwidth but also enhance the harmonic yields of the generated spectrum. Thus a high-efficiency supercontinuum with the photon energies ranging from 205 eV to 480 eV is observed. Based on our 3D propagation simulations, we show that the short quantum path of the supercontinuum is well phase-matched and can be selected under suitable propagation conditions. Thereby, the modulation due to quantum path interference is largely reduced and intense isolated sub-100 as pulses with tunable central wavelengths are directly obtained within water window spectral region.

With the classical fermion molecular dynamics model (FMD), we investigated electron emissions from H(2)(+) by circularly polarized laser pulses. The obtained electron momentum distribution clearly shows an angular shift relative to the expected direction for H(2)(+) aligned parallel to the polarization plane, which is in good agreement with the recent experimental result. By tracing the classical trajectory, we provide direct evidence for the electron delayed emission with respect to the instant when the electric field is parallel to the molecular axis, which was regarded as the origin of the angular shift in the electron momentum distribution. Furthermore, we find that the angular shift decreases with increasing the laser wavelength.

We propose a method to markedly increase the electron-recollision kinetic energy, using the combination of a 0.8 μm/13 fs driving pulse with a much weaker multi-cycle mid-infrared pulse at 10.4 μm. The results show that the synthesized field effectively lengthens the accelerated distance of electron wave packet and the harmonic cutoff is significantly extended to IP+26UP, which is covered with the water-window spectral region. In addition, only one single quantum path contributes to harmonics, and those higher than IP+15UP become continuous. This supercontinuum can support the generation of an isolated sub-100 as pulse with tunable central wavelength and also the pulse with the duration below one atomic unit of time (24 as). Moreover, our scheme can further extend to more longer driving pulses, which provides a dramatic approach for cutoff extension and broadband supercontinuum generation with multi-cycle pump pulses., (© 2012 Optical Society of America)

We theoretically investigate the laser wavelength dependence of asymmetric dissociation of H2(+). It is found that the electron localization in molecular dissociation is significantly manipulated by varying the wavelength of the driving field. Through creating a strong nuclear vibration in the laser-molecular interaction, our simulations demonstrate that the few-cycle mid-infrared pulse can effectively localize the electron at one of the dissociating nuclei with weak ionization. Moreover, we show that the observed phase-shift of the dissociation asymmetry is attributed to the different population transfers by the remaining fields after the internuclear distances reach the one-photon coupling point.

Photoelectron angular distributions (PADs) of oriented polar molecules in response to different polarized lasers are systematically investigated. It is found that the PADs of polar CO molecules show three distinct styles excited by linearly, elliptically and circularly polarized lasers respectively. In the case of elliptical polarization, a deep suppression is observed along the major axis and the distribution concentrates approximately along the minor axis. Additionally, it is also found that the concentrated distributions rotate clockwise as the ellipticity increases. Our investigation presents a method to manipulate the motion and angular distribution of photoelectrons by varying the polarization of the exciting pulses, and also implies the possibility to control the processes in laser-molecule interactions in future work., (© 2011 Optical Society of America)

We theoretically investigate the broadband water-window supercontinuum generation from pre-excited medium with a mid-infrared pulse. We find that the wavelength scaling of the harmonic yield from near-visible (0.8 μm) to mid-infrared (1.8 μm) in single-atom level is λ(-2.7). Using an intense phase-stabilized few-cycle 1.6 μm laser pulse, a broadband water window supercontinuum with bandwidth of approximately 140 eV is obtained. We also investigate the macroscopic effects and find that large initial population of the excited state leads to the high-density of free electrons, which shift the carrier-envelop phase of the driving pulse and further diminish the water-window supercontinuum generation. The highly-ionized medium also results in poor temporal and spatial properties of the attosecond pulse. Instead, small initial population of the excited state can produce well phase-matched xuv supercontinuum in water-window region and an 100-as pulse with central wavelength of 2.8 nm and pulse energy of 0.15 nJ can be filtered out., (© 2011 Optical Society of America)

We present a theoretical study of isolated attosecond pulse generation in pre-excited medium driven by an intense few-cycle laser pulse. We show that the generation of the macroscopic xuv supercontinuum is governed by the initial population of the excited state. Large initial population of the excited state leads to the high density of the free electrons in the media and strongly changes macroscopic properties of the driving pulse and the supercontinuum, and diminishes the isolated attosecond pulse generation. Instead, small initial population of 5% in the pre-excited media subjected to the few-cycle driving pulse can produce well phase-matched xuv supercontinuum, and a pure intense isolated attosecond pulse with the pulse duration of approximately 150 as and the pulse energy up to 0.5 nJ is directly obtained.

We have investigated the correlated electron dynamics in nonsequential double ionization (NSDI) of helium by the orthogonally polarized two-color pulses that consisted of an 800-nm and a 400-nm laser fields using the classical ensemble model. Depending on the relative phase of the two-color field, the electron momentum distributions along the polarization direction of the 800-nm field exhibit a surprisingly strong anticorrelated or correlated behavior. Back analysis reveals that recollisions eventually leading to NSDI are concentrated in a time window as short as several hundreds attoseconds with this scheme. By changing the relative phase of the two-color field, the revisit time of recolliding electron wave packet has been controlled with attosecond precision, which is responsible for the various correlated behaviors of the two electrons. Our results reveal that the orthogonally polarized two-color field can serve as a powerful tool to control the correlated electron dynamics in NSDI.

Bragg gratings with the bandwidth(FWHM) narrowed up to 79 pm were inscribed in double-cladding fiber with femtosecond radiation and a phase mask followed by an annealing treatment. With the annealing temperature below a critical value, the bandwidth of Bragg gratings induced by Type I-IR and Type II-IR index change was narrowed without the reduction of reflectivity. The bandwidth narrowing is due to the profile transformation of the refractive index modulation caused by the annealing treatment. This mechanism was verified by comparing bandwidth narrowing processes of FBGs written with different power densities.

A compact in-fiber refractive index (RI) sensor is presented that is based on a microhole created in a conventional single-mode fiber by the use of femtosecond laser micromachining. The transmission properties of such a device with a microhole of different diameters have been investigated in the wavelength region of 1500-1600 nm and in the RI range of 1.30-1.45. It is found that the relationship between the transmission and the RI is critically dependent on the size of the microhole in the fiber core region. The highest resolution obtained is 6.70x10(-5), in the RI range of 1.37-1.42, when the microhole diameter is approximately 8 microm, close to the fiber core size. The in-fiber RI sensor developed in this work is easy to fabricate and can be used to implement temperature-independent measurements.

We present quantum mechanical calculations of double ionization of HeH(+) molecules by intense laser pulses at various intensities. The resulting two-electron momentum distributions exhibit a clear asymmetry, which depends on the laser intensity. The asymmetric charge configuration of HeH(+) is responsible for the asymmetric two-electron momentum distributions. An approach to control the dynamics of double ionization of heteronuclear molecules is proposed.

We propose a method to generate broadband supercontinuum with a modulated polarization gating in the multi-cycle regime. The polarization gating at 1600 nm is employed to intensify the ellipticity dependence of high harmonic signal, and the adding second harmonic (SH) field is used for modulating ionization ratio between the driving field half-cycles. It is shown that longer driving pulses (6 optical cycles, 32.4 fs) can be applied to confine the efficient recollision of electron wave packet to half an optical cycle. The produced bandwidth of the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) supercontinuum is about 280 eV, corresponding to a fourier-transform-limited pulse of 10 as. In addition, an attosecond pulse of about 100 as with tunable wavelength can be straightforwardly obtained just by filtering different range of the spectrum.

A new method of accurately measuring the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of few-cycle pulses is presented. The high-energy photo-electron spectrum by a few-cycle pulse is dominated by photoelectrons bursting in very few short time intervals near the maximum of the pulse envelope. For high laser intensities, the positions of interference fringes in the high-energy cutoff region are very sensitive to the CEP, which can be used to measure and stabilize the CEP precisely. The measurement precision of the CEP strongly depends on the laser intensity for the fastest photoelectrons.

We present an efficient method to observe the high harmonics generated in individual half-cycle of the driving laser pulse by mixing a weak ultraviolet pulse, and then the cutoff of each half-cycle harmonic is imaged. The simulation shows that the information of the driving laser pulse, including the laser intensity, pulse duration and carrier-envelope phase, can be in situ retrieved from the harmonic spectrogram. In addition, our results show that this method also distinguishes the half-cycle high harmonics for a pulse longer than 10 fs, suggesting a potential to extend the CEP measurement to the multi-cycle regime.

The sensitivity of strong-field ionization to atomic orbital helicity has attracted much attention from physicists, due to its potential application in attosecond spectroscopy and spintronics. In order to intuitively observe the physical mechanisms of helicity-dependent ionization rates during photoionization, the concept of the Wigner phase can be used to characterize the different interactions between the rotating electrons and the Coulomb potential. Here, we find that in both one- and three-photon ionization schemes, the electrons liberated more easily by the circularly polarized laser field suffer less influence of the Coulomb potential during the propagation and then accumulate less Winger phase. This result indicates that the strength of the interaction between the rotating electrons and the Coulomb potential can explain the helicity-dependent ionization for different ionization mechanisms universally, which is also supported by our classical ensemble analysis. Our work provides an intuitive perspective towards the physics picture of ionization propensity rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We theoretically investigate the high-order harmonic generation (HHG) driven by dual-pulse lasers. The first pulse of 800 nm can create plasma in the high-density gas target. Then, the second pulse of 1800 nm is spatiotemporally reshaped by the plasma and generates soft x-ray high-order harmonics in the overdriven regime. The simulation results show that adding the first pulse can promote the phase matching of HHG in the cutoff region. As a result, a cutoff-extended HHG is achieved, which is one order of magnitude more intense than that in one pulse scheme reported previously. In dual-pulse driving lasers, the harmonic yield and the cutoff photon energy can be optimized effectively by increasing the gas pressure inside the water window region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high-resolution three-dimensional photoelectron momentum distributions via above-threshold ionization (ATI) of Xe atoms are measured in an intense near circularly polarized laser field using velocity map imaging and tomography reconstruction. Compared to the linearly polarized laser field, the employed near circularly polarized laser field imposes a more strict selection rule for the transition via resonant excitation, and therefore we can selectively enhance the resonant ATI through certain atomic Rydberg states. Our results show the self-reference ionization delay, which is determined from the difference between the measured streaking angles for nonadiabatic ATI via the 4f and 5f Rydberg states, is 45.6 as. Our method provides an accessible route to highlight the role of resonant transition between selected states, which will pave the way for fully understanding the ionization dynamics toward manipulating electron motion as well as reaction in an ultrafast time scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method to produce circularly polarized attosecond pulses with tunable helicity from CO molecule by using an unidirectionally rotating laser field is proposed. It is found that broadband harmonic supercontinuum with circular polarization can be generated from the oriented CO molecule. This enables the production sub‐100 attosecond isolated pulse with the ellipticity as high as 0.9 at the macroscopic level. Moreover, the helicity of the generated high‐order harmonics and the attosecond pulse can be tuned by adjusting the orientation of the CO molecule. This method will be beneficial for the studies on chiral‐specific dynamics and magnetic circular dichroism on an attosecond time scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ultrafast electron pulses generated using femtosecond lasers offer a direct means for investigating ultrafast processes, but the yield of electron emission remains a significant practical limitation. This study demonstrates a substantial enhancement in yield of electron emission from carbon nanotubes induced by two-color (ω + 2 ω) pulses with an 80 MHz repetition rate and this enhancement is non-delay-dependent. Compared to the sum of photocurrents induced by each color pulse individually, the combined two-color pulses result in a remarkable enhancement in yield of electron emission by more than 25 times. We attribute this enhanced yield to carrier-assisted optical field emission: carbon nanotubes sustain high carrier concentration state under laser radiation thereby enhancing yield of electron emission. We propose the carrier migration emission model to provide a semi-quantitative description for the carrier-assisted optical field emission. This phenomenon introduces a new method to increase the yield of ultrafast electron pulses from CNTs and paves the way for next-generation ultrafast electron emitters and on chip ultrafast optoelectronic device. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Using three-dimensional classical ensembles, we have investigated the enhancement of double ionization of perpendicularly aligned H 2 molecules by a 800nm laser pulse with intensity ranging from 1×1014 W/cm2 to 6×1014 W/cm2. The simulated results show that double ionization probability of H 2 strongly depends on R and reaches a maximum at an intensity independent critical distance R C ≈5a.u. Furthermore, the enhancement of double ionization is more pronounced in the cases of weaker or stronger fields. These results, a well indication of the influence of molecular structures and laser–molecule interactions on double ionization of diatomic molecules, are analyzed in detail and qualitatively explained based on the field-induced barrier suppression model and back analysis. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]