Subatomic scale study of atom-generated higher-order harmonic

Abstract

<sec>The higher-order harmonics generated from an atom irradiated by ultarashort laser pulses is one of the important ways to obtain ultrashort attosecond pulses and coherent XUV sources. In order to produce a high-inntensity XUV source, one needs to study the mechanism of harmonic generation. The mechanism of the atomic high harmonic generation can be well understood by the semi-classical three-step model. First, the electron tunnels the barrier formed by the atomic potential and laser electric field, and then it propagates freely in the laser field and can be driven back to the mother ion where it recombines with the ground state of ion. Although the cutoff energy of the high harmonic can be predicted by this model, it cannot provide more information about the harmonic efficiency and the spectral structure. Recently, the generation mechanism of high harmonic has been studied by using the Bohmian trajectory scheme based on the time dependent wave packet. It is found that the harmonic structure can be reconstructed qualitatively by using a single Bohmian trajectory. The more accurate structure of harmonic spectrum needs more Bohmian trajectories. The calculation of these trajectories requires a lot of computation resources because the trajectory calculation is from the numerical solution for the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. In this work, we numerically solve the time-dependent Schrödinger equation of a model atom irradiated by ultrashort laser pulses. The time-dependent dipole moments at different spatial locations are calculated from the time-dependent wave function. The harmonic spectra are calculated from the Fourier transform of the time dipole moments. The harmonic spectra of different spatial locations show that the main emission positions of harmonic emission are near the nuclear region. One can observe the odd- and even-order harmonics at the different spatial positions. There has a larger radiation intensity for the integer-order harmonic. For the odd-order harmonics, their harmonic phases are the same on both sides of <i>x</i> = 0. For the even-order harmonics, their harmonic phases each have a pi difference on both side of <i>x</i> = 0. By using the filtering scheme, we analyze the phases of an harmonic at different spatial locations. It is found that the phase difference leads the odd-order harmonics to increase and the even-order harmonics to disappear. These findings contribute to the understanding of the physical mechanism of higher harmonic generated from an atom irradiated by strong laser pulses.</sec>