Abstract
In recent years the use of high-order harmonic radiation to create and control events on attosecond timescales has grown at a phenomenal rate. With the use of carrier-envelope phase (CEP) stabilization and few-cycle laser systems it is possible to probe physical processes on unprecedented timescales. Here, we report the first experimental observation of high-harmonic emission at individual half-cycles of a laser pulse. We show that these half-cycle emissions are extremely sensitive to the CEP, providing a route to a new single-shot measurement technique of the CEP. We use this technique to measure the CEP of an 8.5 fs pulse at a centre wavelength of 800 nm with an accuracy of 20 as (1 as=1×10−18 s). With appropriate spatio-spectral filtering of the harmonic spectra, our calculations show that we can isolate emission from an individual half-cycle cutoff, which corresponds to a single isolated attosecond pulse of duration <300 as.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank R. Smith for useful discussions and to acknowledge the technical contributions of P. Ruthven, A. Gregory and B. Ratnasekara. This work is supported by the United Kingdom Research Councils through a Basic Technology Programme.
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Haworth, C., Chipperfield, L., Robinson, J. et al. Half-cycle cutoffs in harmonic spectra and robust carrier-envelope phase retrieval. Nature Phys 3, 52–57 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys463
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys463
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