Polarization control of RABBITT in noble gas atoms

Abstract

Abstract The mutual angle formed by the non-collinear polarization axes of two laser pulses is used to control two-photon extreme ultraviolet and infrared ionization of noble gas atoms in the process of reconstruction of attosecond bursts by beating of two-photon transitions (RABBITT). The magnitude and the phase of this beating can be controlled very efficiently by the mutual polarization angle. The mechanism of this control can be understood within the lowest order perturbation theory and the soft photon approximation. We offer a very sensitive test on the polarization control of the angular dependent RABBITT process which validates our numerical simulations. We apply this test to the recent theoretical and experimental results of polarization controlled RABBITT on hydrogen and helium by Boll et al (2023 Phys. Rev. A 107 043113) and heavier noble gases by Jiang et al (2022 Nat. Commun. 13 5072).