University of Baghdad

Institute of Laser for

Postgraduate Studies
OUTLINE
 The revolution started with the invention of
for the generation of soon after
the discovery of the laser itself.

 The development of the technique, together with

the finding of laser materials with a broad gain bandwidth, led
to the generation of the first pulses in 1974.

 Currently, and some related

processes are the gateway to the world.
 science is the art of controlling and measuring
phenomena that occur in the seconds.

 Coherent optical pulses are .

 These pulses are radiation in the extreme

ultraviolet spectral region generated by the interaction
of matter with intense fs pulses.

 The best developed method for , high harmonic

generation , uses the interaction between a of
atoms and an pulse.

 In 2001, when XUV pulses shorter than 1fs were generated by

interacting atoms with intense femtosecond NIR lasers.
 Before the year 2000, post-laser was done
by ,
which is a process.

 Another approach to shorten pulses is by .

 Harmonic generation phenomena was discovered around

1987–1988.

 When a linearly polarized, short pulse laser beam with

intensity on the order of interacts with
, odd harmonics of the fundamental frequency—up to
tens or even hundreds in order— emerge in the output beam.
 As the intensity reaches the level of , the field
near the peak of the each oscillation is to the
.

 The superposition of the laser field and the Coulomb field

transforms the potential well that binds the electron into a
potential barrier.
 In general, Attosecond pulses are normally generated in
noble gases using high harmonic generation.
were used because of their large binding
energies.
 A time-domain understanding of
was subsequently provided by
consisting of :
 : An intense oscillating electric field (i.e. driving laser)

ionizes an electron from an atom (commonly a noble gas) and

accelerates it away into free space.

: When the electric field changes direction, the electron

turns around and accelerates back towards the parent ion, gaining a

substantial amount of kinetic energy in the process.

: If the electron recombines with the parent ion, the

excess amount of kinetic energy is released as a single high-energy

photon (usually in the VUV to soft x-ray region, depending on the

laser).
Attosecond XUV pulse generation setup

Sometime, thin metal filters are frequently used in attosecond

pulse generation to block NIR laser light and transmit

attosecond XUV light.

 The power spectrum of high-order harmonic is depicted in
Figure.

 The intensity of the first few order harmonics decreases quickly

as the order increases, after which the intensity remains almost
unchanged over many harmonic orders, forming a plateau.
 When noble gas atoms are driven by linearly polarized
intense near infrared (NIR) laser pulses containing multiple
optical cycles, a can be generated.

 The idea that HHG could give rise to attosecond pulses

using a frequency domain argument:

.
train of attosecond pulses corresponding to five plateau Harmonics with
∆𝑡 = 500 𝑎𝑠.
 The attosecond pulse train corresponding to high-order
harmonics is useful for some applications.

 However, pulses are required for

with well-defined time to
start and to observe a process.

 Such pulses can be

, which can be by using
lasers or with a
sub-cycle opening time.
 is the most important specification of
attosecond pulses. 12 attoseconds record for shortest time
interval measured as of 12 May 2010.

: the conversion efficiency from laser to

attosecond pulse is still very low, on the order of 10−6 or
less. The energy of attosecond pulses is on the order of nJ
or less.

: It was found that the divergence angle

of the XUV beam is smaller than that of the driving laser.
 The streak camera has been used to measure the duration of
single isolated attosecond pulses.

 The streak camera converts temporal information to spatial

information, because it is much easier to measure spatial
information.
 Attosecond can be used in Pump–Probe Experiments:

1. : The
attosecond optical pulses provided a unique tool fo robserving the very
fast oscillation of the light wave.

2. : attosecond pulses
make it possible to directly observe the electric field in the transverse
plane of finite size.
3. : The atomic
unit of time is 24 attoseconds; therefore to speak about attosecond
science is tantamount to time-resolved electron dynamics in its natural
timescale.
[1] Zenghu Chang, ―fundamentals of attosecond optics‖,
Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, 2011.

[2] Luis Plaja, Ricardo Torres and Amelle Zaïr, ―Attosecond

Physics-Attosecond Measurements and Control of Physical
Systems-‖, Springer, 2013.

[3] Ferenc Krausz and Misha Ivanov,‖ Attosecond physics‖,

Rev. Mod. Phys. 81, 163, February 2009.