Attosecond recorder of the polarization state of light

Álvaro Jiménez-Galán (), Gopal Dixit, Serguei Patchkovskii, Olga Smirnova, Felipe Morales and Misha Ivanov
Additional contact information
Álvaro Jiménez-Galán: Max-Born-Institute
Gopal Dixit: Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Serguei Patchkovskii: Max-Born-Institute
Olga Smirnova: Max-Born-Institute
Felipe Morales: Max-Born-Institute
Misha Ivanov: Max-Born-Institute

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-6

Abstract: Abstract High harmonic generation in multi-color laser fields opens the opportunity of generating isolated attosecond pulses with high ellipticity. Such pulses hold the potential for time-resolving chiral electronic, magnetization, and spin dynamics at their natural timescale. However, this potential cannot be realized without characterizing the exact polarization state of light on the attosecond timescale. Here we propose and numerically demonstrate a complete solution of this problem. Our solution exploits the extrinsic two-dimensional chirality induced in an atom interacting with the chiral attosecond pulse and a linearly polarized infrared probe. The resulting asymmetry in the photoelectron spectra allows to reconstruct the complete polarization state of the attosecond pulse, including its possible time dependence. The challenging problem of distinguishing circularly polarized, partially polarized, or unpolarized pulses in the extreme ultraviolet range is also resolved. We expect this approach to become the core ingredient for attosecond measurements of chiral-sensitive processes in gas and condensed phase.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03167-2 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-03167-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03167-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().