Tomographic reconstruction of circularly polarized high-harmonic fields: 3D attosecond metrology
Bright, circularly polarized, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and soft x-ray high-harmonic beams can now be produced using counter-rotating circularly polarized driving laser fields. Although the resulting circularly polarized harmonics consist of relatively simple pairs of peaks in the spectral domain, in the time domain, the field is predicted to emerge as a complex series of rotating linearly polarized bursts, varying rapidly in amplitude, frequency, and polarization. We extend attosecond metrology techniques to circularly polarized light by simultaneously irradiating a copper surface with circularly polarized high-harmonic and linearly polarized infrared laser fields. The resulting temporal modulation of the photoelectron spectra carries essential phase information about the EUV field. Utilizing the polarization selectivity of the solid surface and by rotating the circularly polarized EUV field in space, we fully retrieve the amplitude and phase of the circularly polarized harmonics, allowing us to reconstruct one of the most complex coherent light fields produced to date. ; This work was done at JILA. We gratefully acknowledge support from the NSF through the Physics Frontiers Centers Program with grant no. PHY1125844 and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation EPiQS (Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems) Initiative through Grant GBMF4538 to M.M. C.H.-G. acknowledges support from the Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship within the European Union Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (2007–2013), under Research Executive Agency grant agreement no. 328334. R.K. acknowledges the Swedish Research Council (VR) for financial support. A.J.-B. was supported by grants from the U.S. NSF (grant nos. PHY-1125844 and PHY-1068706). C.H.-G. and L.P. acknowledge support from Junta de Castilla y León (project SA116U13) and MINECO (Ministerio de Econom a y Competitividad) (FIS2013-44174-P and FIS2015-71933-REDT). This work used the Janus supercomputer, which is supported by the U.S. NSF (grant no. CNS-0821794) and the University of Colorado, Boulder. P.G. acknowledges support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (no. GR 4234/1-1).