Selective enhancement of a single harmonic emission in a driving laser field with subcycle waveform control.

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate a robust scheme to select a single high-order harmonic among the harmonic comb by using a driving laser field with subcycle waveform control, which is synthesized by the fundamental 800nm laser pulse and two controlling laser pulses at 400 and 267nm with perpendicular polarizations. By controlling the relative phase among the pulses of different colors, a single high-order harmonic is selectively enhanced while the adjacent harmonics are greatly suppressed with the intensity contrast increased by more than 1 order of magnitude and the peak intensity enhanced simultaneously by more than 2 orders of magnitude compared to the case by using only the fundamental 800nm laser pulse. Such phenomena can be mainly attributed to the intra-atomic phase matching realized with the sub-cycle waveform controlled field.