Abstract
Extreme-ultravoilet (XUV) attosecond pulses with durations of a few tens of attosecond have been successfully applied for exploring ultrafast electron dynamics at the atomic scale. But their weak intensities limit the further application in demonstrating nonlinear responses of inner-shell electrons. Optical attosecond pulses will provide sufficient photon flux to initiate strong-field processes. Here we proposed a novel method to generate an ultra-intense isolated optical attosecond pulse through relativistic multi-cycle laser pulse interacting with a designed gas-foil target. The underdense gas target sharpens the multi-cycle laser pulse, producing a dense layer of relativistic electrons with a thickness of a few hundred nanometers. When the dense electron layer passes through an oblique foil, it emits single ultra-intense half-cycle attosecond pulse in the visible and ultraviolet spectral range. The emitted pulse has a peak intensity exceeding 1018 W/cm2 and full-width-half-maximum duration of 200 as. The peak power of this attosecond light source reaches 2 terawatt. The proposed method relaxes the single-cycle requirement on the driving pulse for isolated attosecond pulse generation and significantly boosts the peak power, thus it may open up the route to new experiments tracking the nonlinear response of inner-shell electrons as well as nonlinear attosecond phenomena investigation.
Highlights
Attosecond pulses can reveal electron dynamics at the atomic scale, and the attosecond techniques has undergone remarkable development in the past decade[1,2,3]
We propose a novel scheme to produce isolated attosecond pulses with a peak power of 2.1 TW in the visible and ultraviolet spectral range by a specially designed target geometry
When the dense relativistic electron layer passes through that oblique foil, an intense transverse current is triggered, emitting an optical half-cycle pulse with a duration of a few hundred attosecond at the rear side of the oblique foil[15,19]
Summary
Attosecond pulses can reveal electron dynamics at the atomic scale, and the attosecond techniques has undergone remarkable development in the past decade[1,2,3]. When the dense relativistic electron layer passes through that oblique foil, an intense transverse current is triggered, emitting an optical half-cycle pulse with a duration of a few hundred attosecond at the rear side of the oblique foil[15,19]. The high-intensity unipolar half-cycle pulse maintains its temporal structure in low-density gas and accelerates background electrons to relativistic energies with asymmetric angular distribution.
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