Harmonic emission spectra and attosecond pulse generation from helium atom driven by the mid-infrared nonhomogeneous field

ABSTRACT

The generations of the high-order harmonics and the attosecond pulses from helium atom driven by the mid-infrared symmetric and asymmetric nonhomogeneous field have been theoretically investigated. It is found that (i) due to the surface plasmon polaritons in the metallic nanostructure, the extensions of the harmonics from the positive and the negative laser amplitudes, or only from the positive laser amplitude can be found for the cases of symmetric and asymmetric nonhomogeneous fields, respectively. (ii) The wavelength scalings of the harmonic cutoff and the harmonic yield show that the harmonic cutoff and the harmonic yield can be extended and decreased with the increase in laser wavelength, respectively. However, due to the limit of the gap size of the nanostructure, the threshold value of the harmonic cutoff can be achieved for a given gap size of the nanostructure. (iii) By adding a weak terahertz field to the mid-infrared fundamental field with the asymmetric nonhomogeneous effect, the intensity of the harmonic plateau can be enhanced by one order of magnitude, showing a 1280 eV supercontinuum with the single quantum trajectory contribution. Finally, by properly superposing the harmonics, some attosecond X-ray pulses shorter than 35 as can be produced.

KEYWORDS:

• Attosecond X-ray pulses
• high-order harmonic generation
• spatially nonhomogeneous field
• wavelength scaling of harmonic cutoff
• wavelength scaling of harmonics yield

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Professor Ke-Li Han for providing us the computational code used in the present work.