Abstract

Quantum manipulation of populations and pathways in matter by light pulses, so-called coherent control, is currently one of the hottest research areas in optical physics and photochemistry. The forefront of coherent control research is moving rapidly into the regime of extreme ultraviolet wavelength and attosecond temporal resolution. This advance has been enabled by the development of high harmonic generation light sources driven by intense femtosecond laser pulses and by the advent of seeded free electron laser sources. Synchrotron radiation, which is usually illustrated as being of poor temporal coherence, hitherto has not been considered as a tool for coherent control. Here we show an approach based on synchrotron radiation to study coherent control in the extreme ultraviolet and attosecond regime. We demonstrate this capability by achieving wave-packet interferometry on Rydberg wave packets generated in helium atoms.

Highlights

  • Quantum manipulation of populations and pathways in matter by light pulses, so-called coherent control, is currently one of the hottest research areas in optical physics and photochemistry

  • The concept of the coherent control achieved in this work relies on the use of longitudinal coherence within the waveform of light wave packets produced by individual relativistic electrons, rather than the phase relationships between the light wave packets inside a whole light pulse

  • This work has demonstrated that synchrotron radiation from the twin undulator setup provides an original framework for coherent control in the XUV and attosecond regime

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Summary

Introduction

Quantum manipulation of populations and pathways in matter by light pulses, so-called coherent control, is currently one of the hottest research areas in optical physics and photochemistry. The forefront of coherent control research is moving rapidly into the regime of extreme ultraviolet wavelength and attosecond temporal resolution This advance has been enabled by the development of high harmonic generation light sources driven by intense femtosecond laser pulses and by the advent of seeded free electron laser sources. We show an approach based on synchrotron radiation to study coherent control in the extreme ultraviolet and attosecond regime We demonstrate this capability by achieving wave-packet interferometry on Rydberg wave packets generated in helium atoms. One of the most elementary forms of coherent control is the Brumer-Shapiro scheme[3] in which two excitation paths to a resonance are made to interfere using the fundamental and a harmonic of a laser This basic technique has been followed by more highly developed schemes, among which one standard method is wave-packet interferometry[4,5]. We report a proof-of-principle experiment demonstrating coherent control in the XUV and attosecond regime by synchrotron radiation

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