Generation of elliptically polarized high harmonics and attosecond pulses
Dr. Andreas Becker University of Colorado Boulder, USA
Extreme ultraviolet and soft x-ray radiation are important light tools for studying the dynamics of fundamental processes in atoms, molecules and materials on ultrashort time scales. High harmonic generation provides the opportunity to produce such light in a tabletop experimental setting. For a long time, experiments generated and applied linearly polarized harmonics, only recently several methods have been proposed and demonstrated to overcome this limitation. In my talk I will review different scenarios used to generate elliptically polarized laser pulses, which have been used in applications ranging from observing molecular chirality to magnetic interactions. I will then focus on the specific set-up of cross-polarized bichromatic laser pulses and discuss numerical results that confirm earlier experimental observations of high-order harmonics with large ellipticities.