Abstract
The applications of isolated attosecond pulses reported to date, which have demonstrated the great potential of attosecond technology in the investigation of ultrafast electronic processes, have been limited by the low photon flux of the available attosecond sources. We report on the generation of isolated sub-160-as pulses (at a photon energy of ∼30 eV) with a pulse energy, on target, of a few nanojoules. The efficient generation of isolated attosecond pulses in noble gases is produced by 5-fs driving pulses with controlled electric field and peak intensity beyond the gas saturation intensity. The availability of attosecond sources with high peak intensities has potential in opening new avenues for attosecond-pump/attosecond-probe studies of electronic processes in atomic and molecular physics, with interesting prospects in the field of coherent control of electronic motion in complex systems in the attosecond temporal regime.
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Acknowledgements
The research leading to the results presented in this paper was supported by funding from the European Research Council under the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 227355 – ELYCHE. The authors acknowledge financial support from the Italian Ministry of Research (FIRB-IDEAS RBID08CRXK), support from European Union under contract no. 228334 JRA-ALADIN (Laserlab Europe II) and from MC-RTN ATTOFEL (FP7-238362).
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F.F., F.C. and M.L. contributed equally to this work and performed the experiments. F.C. performed the three-dimensional simulations, M.L. performed the saddle-point simulations and F.F. and M.L. performed the FROG CRAB simulations. C.V. and S.S. contributed to the development of the experimental setup. G.S. was responsible for the construction of the attosecond cross-correlation setup. M.N. supervised the project and wrote the manuscript.
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Ferrari, F., Calegari, F., Lucchini, M. et al. High-energy isolated attosecond pulses generated by above-saturation few-cycle fields. Nature Photon 4, 875–879 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2010.250
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2010.250
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