Extreme Ultraviolet Fractional Orbital Angular Momentum Beams from High Harmonic Generation

We investigate theoretically the generation of extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) beams carrying fractional orbital angular momentum. To this end, we drive high-order harmonic generation with infrared conical refraction (CR) beams. We show that the high-order harmonic beams emitted in the EUV/soft x-ray regi...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Turpin, Alex, Rego Cabezas, Laura, Picón, Antonio, San Román Álvarez de Lara, Julio, Hernández García, Carlos
Formato: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2017
País:España
Recursos:Universidad de Salamanca (USAL)
Repositorio:GREDOS. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Salamanca
OAI Identifier:oai:gredos.usal.es:10366/146886
Acesso em linha:http://hdl.handle.net/10366/146886
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Atomic and molecular interactions with photons
Attosecond science
High-harmonic generation
Nonlinear optics
X-rays
Descrição
Resumo:We investigate theoretically the generation of extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) beams carrying fractional orbital angular momentum. To this end, we drive high-order harmonic generation with infrared conical refraction (CR) beams. We show that the high-order harmonic beams emitted in the EUV/soft x-ray regime preserve the characteristic signatures of the driving beam, namely ringlike transverse intensity profile and CR-like polarization distribution. As a result, through orbital and spin angular momentum conservation, harmonic beams are emitted with fractional orbital angular momentum, and they can be synthesized into structured attosecond helical beams –or “structured attosecond light springs”– with rotating linear polarization along the azimuth. Our proposal overcomes the state of the art limitations for the generation of light beams far from the visible domain carrying non-integer orbital angular momentum and could be applied in fields such as diffraction imaging, EUV lithography, particle trapping, and super-resolution imaging.