Abstract

Recently, high-order harmonic generation has attracted considerable interest for the possibility of generating ultrashort XUV pulses. With the advent of intense lasers that produce pulses of duration a few tens of fs, harmonic pulses of duration below 10 fs can be generated. To pass the limit of the (optical) fundamental period, different schemes have been proposed. Antoine et al. [1] showed that propagation in the macroscopic medium could lead to a phase locking of the different harmonics, resulting in emission of a train of attosecond pulses. Corkum et al. [2] proposed to use the extreme sensitivity of the harmonic efficiency on the polarization of the fundamental field to "extract" a single pulse from such a train.

© 1997 Optical Society of America