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Generation of circularly polarized extreme-ultraviolet harmonics from solids

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Abstract

Circularly polarized sources of radiation play a vital role in photoelectron circular dichroism and magnetic circular dichroism experiments. While circularly polarized radiation can be routinely generated in the visible domain of the electromagnetic spectrum due to the availability of laser sources and optics in this range, generation of circularly polarized radiation in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) domain is challenging and, using table-top sources it is currently limited to high harmonic generation from gases using bi-circular, complicated two-source and/or interferometry arrangement. In this work, being fueled by recent development of high harmonic generation and spectroscopy of solids, we demonstrate the generation of circularly polarized extreme ultraviolet light using interaction of intense circularly polarized drivers. The simplicity of our experimental setup enables rapid application of circularly polarized XUV light in circular dichroism experiments.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge funding from ETH Zürich, the Swiss National Science Foundation through the NCCR-MUST, the ETH Zurich Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (FEL-31 15-2), the Marie Curie Actions for People COFUND Program, and the RGC ECS (27300820) grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratorium für Physikalische Chemie, ETH Zürich, 8093, Zurich, Switzerland

    Tran Trung Luu & Hans Jakob Wörner

  2. Department of Physics, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Tran Trung Luu

Authors
  1. Tran Trung Luu
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  2. Hans Jakob Wörner
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Contributions

HJW and TTL conceived and designed the experiments. TTL carried out the experiments, performed the analyses and calculations. HJW and TTL discussed the results and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Tran Trung Luu.

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Luu, T.T., Wörner, H.J. Generation of circularly polarized extreme-ultraviolet harmonics from solids. Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Top. 230, 4057–4063 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-021-00278-8

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