Near infrared few-cycle pulses for high harmonic generation

Driever, S. and Holzner, K. B. and Delagnes, J. C. and Fedorov, N. and Arnold, M. and Bigourd, D. and Burgy, F. and Descamps, D. and Cormier, Eric and Guichard, R. and Constant, E. and Zair, A. (2014) Near infrared few-cycle pulses for high harmonic generation. JOURNAL OF PHYSICS B: ATOMIC MOLECULAR AND OPTICAL PHYSICS, 47 (20). ISSN 0953-4075

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Abstract

We report on the development of tunable few-cycle pulses with central wavelengths from 1.6 μm to 2 μm. Theses pulses were used as a proof of principle for high harmonic generation in atomic and molecular targets. In order to generate such pulses we produced a filament in a 4 bar krypton cell. Spectral broadening by a factor of 2 - 3 of a 40 fs near infrared input pulse was achieved. The spectrally broadened output pulses were then compressed by fused silica plates down to the few-cycle regime close to the Fourier limit. The auto-correlation of these pulses revealed durations of ∼ 3 cycles for all investigated central wavelengths. Pulses with a central wavelength of 1.7 μm and up to 430 μJ energy per pulse were employed to generate high order harmonics in Xe, Ar and N2. Moving to near infrared few-cycle pulses opens the possibility to operate deeply in the non-perturbative regime with a Keldysh parameter γ << 1. Hence, this source is suitable for the study of the non-adiabatic tunneling regime in most generating systems used for high order harmonic generation and attoscience.

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