The role of absolute phase of few-cycle laser field in the generation and measurement of attosecond high-order harmonic pulses

摘要

The effect of the absolute phase of the few-cycle driving laser pulse on the generation and measurement of high-order harmonic attosecond pulses is investigated theoretically. We find that the position of the generated attosecond soft-x-ray pulse in cutoff region is locked to the oscillations of the driving laser field, but not to the envelope of the laser pulse. This property ensures the success [M. Hentschel et al, Nature vol. 414, 509 (2001)] of the width measurement of attosecond soft-x-ray pulse based on the cross-correlation between the attosecond pulse and its driving laser pulse. However, there is a timing jitter of the order of tens of attoseconds between the attosecond pulse and the driving laser field. This sets a limit for the measurement with the shorter attosecond pulses if we cannot control the absolute phase of the few-cycle laser field. Also, we propose a novel method to detect the absolute phase of the driving laser field by measuring the spatial distribution of the photoelectrons induced by the attosecond soft-x-ray pulse and its driving laser pulse.