Sub-50-as isolated extreme ultraviolet continua generated by 1.6-cycle near-infrared pulse combined with double optical gating scheme

Abstract

We demonstrate the generation of ultrabroad bandwidth attosecond continua extending to sub-50-as duration in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) region based on a 1.6-cycle Ti:sapphire laser pulse. The combination of the amplitude gating scheme with a sub-two-cycle driver pulse and the double optical gating scheme achieves the continuum generation with a bandwidth of 70 eV at the full width at half maximum near the peak photon energy of 140 eV, which supports a Fourier-transform-limited pulse duration as short as 32 as. The carrier-envelope-phase (CEP) dependence of the attosecond continua shows a single-peak structure originating from the half-cycle cut-off at appropriate CEP values, which strongly indicates the generation of a single burst of an isolated attosecond pulse. Our approach suggests a possibility for isolated sub-50-as pulse generation in the EUV region by compensating for the intrinsic attosecond chirp with a Zr filter.