Intense isolated few-cycle attosecond XUV pulses from overdense plasmas driven by tailored laser pulses

Abstract

A method to generate an intense isolated few-cycle attosecond XUV pulse is demonstrated using particle-in-cell simulations. When a tailored laser pulse with a sharp edge irradiates a foil target, a strong transverse net current can be excited, which emits a few-cycle XUV pulse from the target rear side. The isolated pulse is ultrashort in the time domain with a duration of several hundred attoseconds. It also has a narrow bandwidth in the spectral domain compared to other XUV sources of high-order harmonics. It has most energy confined around the plasma frequency and no low-harmonic orders below the plasma frequency. It is also shown that XUV pulse of peak field strength up to $ 8\times 10^{12} $ V$\mathrm{m}^{-1}$ can be produced. Without the need for pulse selecting and spectral filtering, such an intense few-cycle XUV pulse is better suited to a number of applications.