Helicity-selected near-circularly polarized attosecond pulses generated from mixed He-Ne gases
Chunyang Zhai, Xiaosong Zhu, Yingbin Li, Qingbin Tang, Benhai Yu, Pengfei Lan, Peixiang Lu
Abstract
We present and theoretically demonstrate a method for generating helicity-selected near-circularly polarized attosecond pulses in mixed He-Ne gases using bichromatic counter-rotating circularly polarized (BCCP) fields. High-order harmonics driven by BCCP fields exhibit circular polarization for individual orders in the frequency domain, but adjacent orders have opposite helicities. By utilizing the He-Ne mixture, we select only one helical component of the harmonics, resulting in the generation of highly elliptically polarized attosecond pulses in the time domain. Our analyses based on the quantum-orbit theory and the strong-field approximation further clarify that the polarization of attosecond pulses is governed by the interference mechanism of high-order harmonics emitted by He and Ne. This combination of BCCP fields and an atomic mixture which requires no alignment in experiments significantly simplifies the generation of elliptically polarized harmonics dominated by one helical component, thereby paving the way for an efficient and robust method to generate bright attosecond pulses with large ellipticity.