Determination of the carrier-envelope phase of few-cycle laser pulses with terahertz-emission spectroscopy

By M. Kreß, T. Löffler, M. Thomson, R. Dörner, H. Gimpel, K. Zrost, T. Ergler, R. Moshammer, U. Morgner, J. Ullrich and 1 more. 2006

223 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The availability of few-cycle optical pulses opens a window to physical phenomena occurring on the attosecond timescale. To take full advantage of such pulses, it is crucial to measure1,2,3,4 and stabilize1,2 their carrier-envelope (CE) phase, that is, the phase difference between the carrier wave and the envelope function. We introduce an approach to determine the CE phase by down-conversion of the laser light to the terahertz (THz) frequency range by means of plasma generation in ambient air, an isotropic medium where optical rectification (down-conversion) in the forward direction is only possible if the inversion symmetry is broken by electrical or optical means5,6,7,8,9,10. We show that few-cycle pulses directly produce a spatial charge asymmetry in the plasma. The asymmetry, associated with THz emission, depends on the CE phase, which allows determination of the phase by measurement of the amplitude and polarity of the THz pulse.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9a46b1f5b2219fb487ca8db272777f73ca0c24a

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Table-top sources of ultrashort THz pulses (2007, background): “Such an asymmetry is expected for extremely short pump pulses (5 fs or so for a wavelength of 800 nm) [146, 150], but not for the comparatively long pulses (140 fs) used in [145].”
A review of terahertz sources (2014, methodology): “As a diagnostic method, gas photoionization allows the measurement of the carrier-envelope phase of short laser pulses [118].”