Abstract

It is well established, both experimentally and theoretically, that atoms exposed to a strong laser pulse emit high order harmonics of the driving field. Although this process has been intensively studied theoretically, the main effort has been focused so far on the study of the harmonic spectrum while no attempt has been made to analyse systematically its time evolution. We show that the time profile of each harmonic may be obtained through a time-frequency analysis of the acceleration of the atomic dipole. We show also that such an analysis, which is very sensitive to the details of the dynamics, provides valuable information about the competition between photon emission and ionization processes.

© 1994 Optical Society of America