Photocurrent generation in solids via linearly polarized laser

Abstract

To add to the rapidly progressing field of ultrafast photocurrent, we propose a universal method to generate photocurrent in normal and topological materials using a pair of multicycle linearly polarized laser pulses. The interplay of the fundamental and its second harmonic pulses is studied for the generation of photocurrent in Weyl semimetals by varying the angle between the polarization direction, relative intensity, and relative phase delay. It has been found that the presence of a comparatively weaker second harmonic pulse is sufficient to generate substantial photocurrent. Moreover, significant photocurrent is generated even when polarization directions are orthogonal for certain ratios of the lasers' intensities. In addition, the photocurrent is found to be susceptible to the delay between the two pulses. We have illustrated that all our findings are extendable to non-topological and two-dimensional materials, such as graphene and molybdenum disulfide.