Abstract
Sub-10 attosecond pulses (APs) with half-cycle electric fields provide exceptional options to detect and manipulate electrons in the atomic timescale. However, the availability of such pulses is still challenging. Here, we propose a method to generate isolated sub-10 attosecond half-cycle pulses based on a cascade process naturally happening in plasma. A backward AP is first generated by shooting a moderate overdense plasma with a one-cycle femtosecond pulse. After that, an electron sheet with the thickness of several nanometers is formed and accelerated forward by the electrostatic field. Then this electron sheet goes through unipolar perturbations driven by the tail of the first-stage AP instead of the initial laser pulse. As a result, a half-cycle sub-10 AP is cascadedly produced in the transmission direction. Two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations indicate that an isolated half-cycle pulse with the duration of 7.3 attoseconds can be generated from the cascaded scheme. Apart from a one-cycle driving pulse, such a scheme also can be realized with a commercial 100 TW 25 fs driving laser by shaping the pulse with a relativistic plasma lens in advance.
Highlights
Half-cycle pulses, called unipolar pulses, refer temporally asymmetrical near-single-cycle pulses whose fields in one polarity are predominantly stronger than that in the opposite polarity[1]
We propose a theoretical scheme of generating an isolated sub-10-attosecond half-cycle pulse from the interaction of a relativistic laser pulse with a moderate overdense plasma
The resulting pulse duration relies on the perturbation duration as well as the thickness and speed of the electron sheet
Summary
Half-cycle pulses, called unipolar pulses, refer temporally asymmetrical near-single-cycle pulses whose fields in one polarity are predominantly stronger than that in the opposite polarity[1]. Such pulses normally generate from collective unidirectional motion of electrons. The generation of attosecond half-cycle pulses in extreme-ultra-violet (XUV) range from relativistic laser-plasma interaction[9,10,11] is attracting much attention. We propose a theoretical scheme of generating an isolated sub-10-attosecond half-cycle pulse from the interaction of a relativistic laser pulse with a moderate overdense plasma. The multi-cycle pulse transforms into a pulse with a sharp rising edge, which leads to the generation of a 40-attosecond half-cycle pulse in the same scheme as the one-cycle driving laser
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