Volume 3 Issue 1, January 2007
When a medium is irradiated with a laser pulse so intense that it forces the medium's electrons to move in synchrony with the laser's electric field, the exact phase of this field with respect to the pulse envelope — known as the carrier-envelope hase (CEP) — plays an important role in determining how the medium responds. Measuring the value of this phase is challenging, and usually requires averaging over many pulses. In this issue, Charles Haworth and colleagues show that by analysing the high harmonics generated by the interaction of an intense femtosecond laser pulse with a gaseous medium, they can determine the CEP of a single pulse. Moreover, they suggest that such an approach could soon enable individual attosecond pulses emitted during a particular optical half-cycle of the driving field to be isolated.
Editorial
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