Carrier-envelope phase effects on the reflectance of diamond films irradiated by ultrashort single-cycle light pulses: A comparison study in attosecond and femtosecond regimes

Abstract

Diamond films irradiated with few-cycle laser pulses are emerging as a all-optical information processing device with high-speed and low-power-consumption. The possibility to steer, control or switch such few-cycle laser pulses with diamond films is expected to pave the way towards ultrafast all-optical switching. Here, we show theoretically the effect of the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of the ultrashort single-cycle light pulses on the reflectance of diamond films within the framework of multi-scale theory. We observe clear variations in the reflectance behavior of femtosecond pulses and attosecond pulses. Our most important finding is that the reflectivity difference of attosecond pulses with different waveforms and the same spectrum on diamond films exhibits a perfect quadratic relationship with the CEP. This observation suggests that the nonlinearity of attosecond pulses is different from that of femtosecond pulses. Analysis of these results allows us to gain new insights in the interaction between attosecond light pulses and matter. This opens fascinating avenues for all-optical information processing over ultrashort lengths and timescales.