Attosecond lighthouses in gases: A theoretical and numerical study
Abstract
We present an extensive theoretical and numerical study of the attosecond lighthouse effect in gases. We study how this scheme impacts the spatiotemporal structure of the driving laser field all along the generation medium, and show that this can modify the phase matching relation governing high-harmonic generation (HHG) in gases. We then present a set of numerical simulations performed to test the robustness of the effect against variations of HHG parameters, and to identify possible solutions for relaxing the constraint on the driving laser pulse duration. We thus demonstrate that the lighthouse effect can actually be achieved with laser pulses consisting of up to ∼8 optical periods available from current lasers without postcompression, for instance by using an appropriate combination of 800− and 1600-nm wavelength fields.