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Accessing precisely to the phase variation of electronic wave-packet (EWP) provides unprecedented spatiotemporal information of microworld. A radial interference pattern at near-zero energy has been widely observed in experiments of strong-field photoionization. However, the underlying physical picture of this interference pattern is still under debate. Here we report an experimental and theoretical investigation of this low-energy interference structure (LEIS) in mid-infrared laser fields. We clarify that the LEIS arises due to the soft-recollision mechanism, which was previously found to play a pivotal role in producing the pronounced low-energy structure. Specifically, the LEIS is induced by the interference between direct and soft-recollision EWPs launched within a 1/18 laser-cycle time scale in our experiments. Moreover, the observation of LEIS is independent of laser wavelength and specific atomic targets. Our result opens a promising new avenue for retrieving the structure and dynamics of EWPs in atoms and molecules with attosecond time resolution.

High order harmonic generation (HHG) in semiconductors opens a new frontier in strong field physics and attosecond science. However, the underlying physical mechanisms are not yet fully understood and lively debated. Here, we identify and discuss carrier-wave population transfer as a novel and important dynamical effect. We find that the interband excitation occurs in an extremely short time window due to the intraband motion. Our analysis based on this finding allows for a physically intuitive interpretation of the anomalous carrier-envelope phase dependence observed in HHG from MgO and to understand the dominant role of the interband polarization as reported in a series of recent semiconductor HHG experiments. Motivated by the discovered coupling mechanism, we demonstrate that the interband excitation can be controlled by an appropriately tailored two-color field. An ultrabroad supercontinuum spectrum covering the entire plateau region can be generated which directly creates an isolated-attosecond pulse even without phase compensation. Our results provide remarkable insight into the basic physics governing the sub-cycle electron motion with significant implications for the generation of isolated-attosecond light pulses in semiconductor materials.

High-harmonic generation in metasurfaces, driven by strong laser fields, has been widely studied. Compared to plasma, all-dielectric nanoscale metasurfaces possess larger nonlinearity response and higher damage threshold. Additionally, it can strongly localize the driven field, greatly enhancing its peak amplitude. In this work, we adopt a Fano resonant micro-nano structure with transmission peaks at different wavelengths and explore its nonlinear response by both single and two-color pump fields. Compared to the high-order harmonics induced by the first resonant wavelength, the intensity of the high-harmonic radiation results is enhanced by one order of magnitude, when the metasurface is driven by various resonant and non-resonant wavelength combinations of a two-color field.

We investigate the coherent control of spectra effects with chirped femtosecond laser pulse propagation in a two-level-atom medium. It is found that the spectral feature depends crucially on the sign and magnitude of the initial chirp rate. For small chirp rate, blueshift or redshift of the spectrum can occur depending on the sign of the chirp. However, for relative large chirp rate, the medium can become transparent to positive chirped pulse, whereas in the case of negative chirped pulse, higher spectral components can be produced even for small area pulses.

Using a combination of a laser pulse and its third harmonic (resonant with the medium), we investigate the two-color interference effects for ultrashort laser pulses propagating in a two-level medium. It is found that the interference effects of the two laser pulses can substantially modify the behavior of the spectra and propagation features: higher spectral components can be produced even for small pulse areas due to the interference effects of the two laser pulses. Moreover, the oscillatory structures around the resonant frequency and the propagation features of the laser pulses depend sensitively on the relative phase φ of the two pulses.

Controlling light emission out of subwavelength nanoslit/aperture structures is of great important for highly integrated photonic circuits. Here we propose a new method to achieve direction-tunable emission based on a compact metallic microcavity with double nanoslit. Our method combines the principles of Young's interference and surface plasmon polaritons interference. We show that the direction of the far-field beam can be controlled over a wide range of angles by manipulating the frequency and relative phase of light arriving at the two slits, which holds promise for applications in the ultracompact optoelectronic devices.

We present a method to generate an extremely short unipolar half-cycle pulse based on resonant propagation of a few-cycle pulse through asymmetrical media with periodic subwavelength structure. Moreover, single- and few-cycle gap solitons with different frequencies are found to split from one incident few-cycle ultrashort pulse. These solitons with various frequencies provide evidence for the generation of different parametric waves during the strong light-matter coupling in asymmetrical media under the extreme nonlinear optics condition. Because of the pulse self-shaping process during the course of resonant propagation, the generated low-frequency sideband and another broadband continuum sideband ranging from the visible to the near-infrared regime couple together, which results in the generation of the subfemtosecond unipolar half-cycle pulse. A time-frequency analysis is preformed which corroborates the mechanism. The generated unipolar half-cycle pulse might be utilized to control and probe the ultrafast electronic dynamics.

We investigate the local field effects in a ZnO dense medium. Our results show due to the local-field effects, the Lorentz shifts can be found in the reflected spectra driven by the few-cycle laser pulse. Moreover, the dynamic Lorentz shifts depend sensitively on the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of the few-cycle laser pulse, which provides a useful means to obtain the CEP information by the frequency shifts.

The propagation behaviors, which include the carrier-envelope phase, the area evolution and the solitary pulse number of few-cycle pulses in a dense two-level medium, are investigated based on full-wave Maxwell-Bloch equations by taking Lorentz local field correction (LFC) into account. Several novel features are found: the difference of the carrier-envelope phase between the cases with and without LFC can go up to pi at some location; although the area of ultrashort solitary pulses is lager than 2 pi, the area of the effective Rabi frequency, which equals to that the Rabi frequency pluses the product of the strength of the near dipole-dipole (NDD) interaction and the polarization, is consistent with the standard area theorem and keeps 2 pi; the large area pulse penetrating into the medium produces several solitary pulses as usual, but the number of solitary pulses changes at certain condition. (C) 2005 Optical Society of America.

The carrier-envelope phase (CEP)--dependent spectral effect of the reflected few-cycle ultrashort pulse from a dense medium is investigated. It is shown that when adding static electric field, a pronounced CEP dependence of the reflected spectrum can be obtained. Moreover, the period of the CEP-dependent signal becomes $2\ensuremath{\pi}$ because the inversion symmetry for laser-matter interaction is broken, which allows for extraction of the CEP information in both sign and amplitude.

Confinement of electromagnetic energy into a single well-controlled oscillation of light is very important for generation of intense supercontinuum radiation. We find that the pulse breakup of few-cycle ultrashort laser pulses via resonant propagation effects can achieve this aim. By extracting such pulses and then focusing them to drive the He atoms, about 200 eV intense supercontinuum radiation can be generated, which is capable of supporting similar to 20 attosecond isolated pulse generation.

We investigate the carrier-wave Rabi flopping effects in an asymmetric semiparabolic semiconductor quantum well (QW) with few-cycle pulse. It is found that higher spectral components of few-cycle ultrashort pulses in the semiparabolic QW depend crucially on the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of the few-cycle ultrashort pulses: continuum and distinct peaks can be achieved by controlling the CEP. Our results demonstrate that by adjusting the CEP of few-cycle ultrashort pulses, the intersubband dynamics in the asymmetric semiparabolic QW can be controlled in an ultrashort timescale with moderate laser intensity.

We theoretically demonstrate the selective enhancement of high-order harmonic generation (HHG) in two-color laser fields consisting of a single-cycle fundamental wave (800 nm wavelength) and a multicycle subharmonic wave (2400 nm wavelength). By performing time-frequency analyses based on a single-active-electron model, we reveal that such an enhancement is a result of the modified electron trajectories in the two-color field. Furthermore, we show that selectively enhanced HHG gives rise to a bandwidth-controllable extreme ultraviolet supercontinuum in the plateau region, facilitating the generation of intense single isolated attosecond pulses.

We theoretically show that selection of a single quantum path in high-order harmonics generation can be realized in a few-optical-cycle regime with two-color schemes. We also demonstrate, in theory as well, the generation of spectrally smooth and ultrabroad extreme ultraviolet supercontinuum in argon gas which can produce single similar to 79 as pulses with currently available ultrafast laser sources. Our finding can be beneficial for generating isolated sub-100 as extreme ultraviolet pulses.

We theoretically investigate carrier-envelope phase dependence of few-cycle ultrashort laser pulse propagation in a polar molecule medium. Our results show that a soliton pulse can be generated during the two-photon resonant propagation of few-cycle pulse in the polar molecule medium. Moreover, the main features of the soliton pulse, such as pulse duration and intensity, depend crucially on the carrier-envelope phase of the incident pulse, which could be utilized to determine the carrier-envelope phase of a few-cycle ultrashort laser pulse from a mode-locked oscillator.

The propagation of an arbitrary polarized few-cycle ultrashort laser pulse in a degenerate three-level medium is investigated by using an iterative predictor-corrector finite-difference time-domain method. It is found that the polarization evolution of the ultrashort laser pulse is dependent not only on the initial atomic coherence of the medium but also on the polarization condition of the incident laser pulse. When the initial effective area is equal to 2 pi, complete linear-to-circular and circular-to-linear polarization conversion of few-cycle ultrashort laser pulses can be achieved due to the quantum interference effects between the two different transition paths.

We investigate the physical mechanism of unipolar half-cycle pulses generation in resonant two-level media with inversion symmetry. The unipolar half-cycle pulse contains substantial nonzero dc or zero-frequency component in its Fourier spectrum of the electric field. Here the origin of zero-frequency component generation in inversion symmetric media driven by symmetric electric field is identified. We show that in the regime of extreme nonlinear optics, i.e. the Rabi frequency is comparable to or even larger than the carrier frequency of the laser pulse, the time evolution of the polarization can display obvious up-down asymmetric structure under certain conditions, which manifests in the zero-frequency component generation, and is responsible for the formation of unipolar half-cycle pulses in the course of pulse propagation.

We investigate the soliton frequency shifts for few-cycle ultrashort laser pulses propagating through resonant media embedded within subwavelength structures, and we elucidate the underlying physics. Full-wave Maxwell?Bloch equations are solved numerically by using the finite-difference time-domain method. It is shown that both soliton blueshift and redshift can occur by changing the period of the structures. We found that the rereflected waves play an essential role in this process. When the pulse propagates through the periodic structures, the reflected waves can be rereflected back by the thin layers, which can further induce the controllable frequency shifts of the generated solitons. This suggests a way to tailor the light solitons over a large spectral range.

We investigate the propagation of an arbitrary elliptically polarized few-cycle ultrashort laser pulse in resonant two-level quantum systems using an iterative predictor-corrector finite-difference time-domain method. It is shown that when the initial effective area is equal to $2\ensuremath{\pi}$, the effective area will remain invariant during the course of propagation, and a complete Rabi oscillation can be achieved. However, for an elliptically polarized few-cycle ultrashort laser pulse, polarization conversion can occur. Eventually, the laser pulse will evolve into two separate circularly polarized laser pulses with opposite helicities.

We investigate the influence of ionization on the propagation and spectral effects of a few-cycle ultrashort laser pulse in a two-level medium. It is found that when the fractional ionization is weak, the production of higher spectral components makes no difference. However, when the two states are essentially depleted before the peak of the laser pulse, the impact of ionization on the higher spectral components is very significant.

We investigate the propagation of attosecond pulse in a dense two-level medium by using an iterative predictor-corrector finite-difference time-domain method. We find when attosecond pulse is considered, that the standard area theorem will break down even for small area pulses: ideal self-induced transparency cannot occur even for a 2{pi} pulse, while the pulses whose areas are not integer multiples of 2{pi}, such as 1.8{pi} and 2.2{pi} pulses, cannot evolve to 2{pi} pulses as predicted by the standard area theorem. Significantly higher spectra components can occur on all these small area propagating pulses due to strong carrier reshaping. Furthermore, these higher spectral components dependent sensitively on the pulse area: the larger the pulse area is, the more evident are these higher spectral components.

The spectra of two-color few-cycle pulses in a two-level medium are investigated by solving the full Maxwell-Bloch equations. It is shown that the spectra depend crucially on the relative phase /spl phi/ of the two pulses.

We study the propagation of small area few-cycle optical pulses in a resonant amplifying medium and find an interesting pulse annexation phenomenon, which is different from that in the absorber medium for such pulses.

Using a ω-2ω combination scenario, we investigate the spectra of two-color ultrashort laser pulses in a two-level medium. It is found that higher spectral components can be produced even for small area pulses due to the interference effect of the two laser pulses. Moreover, these higher spectral components depend crucially on the relative phase Φ of the two laser pulses: continuum and distinct peaks can be achieved through the control of the relative phase.

A new type of TE-TM mode splitter is proposed, which uses an asymmetric Y -junction with a gap region. It does not require external electric field and can be fabricated by only titanium diffusion technique. The transmission characteristics of the splitter are simulated by means of the beam propagation method (BMP). The results show that the power splitting ratios for TE-TM modes are 20.3 dB and 23.5 dB, respectively and the excess losses both are below 0.25 dB.

We investigate the carrier?envelope phase dependence of the unipolar half-cycle soliton pulse generation when few-cycle ultrashort laser pulses propagate in resonant asymmetric media. It is found that the half-cycle soliton pulse generation depends on both the permanent dipole moment and the electric field shape of the incident few-cycle ultrashort pulse. The irradiation of low-frequency electromagnetic waves superposes with the incident few-cycle ultrashort pulse, which leads to the generation of half-cycle solitons in quantum systems with broken inversion symmetry. Since the electric field shape of the incident few-cycle ultrashort laser pulse depends sensitively on the carrier?envelope phase, the generated half-cycle solitons depend on the carrier?envelope phase of the incident pulse.

We investigate the photoelectron momentum distribution of molecular-ion H2+driven by ultrashort intense circularly polarized laser pulses. Both numerical solutions of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation (TDSE) and a quasiclassical model indicate that the photoelectron holography (PH) with circularly polarized pulses can occur in molecule. It is demonstrated that the interference between the direct electron wave and rescattered electron wave from one core to its neighboring core induces the PH. Moreover, the results of the TDSE predict that there is a tilt angle between the interference pattern of the PH and the direction perpendicular to the molecular axis. Furthermore, the tilt angle is sensitively dependent on the wavelength of the driven circularly polarized pulse, which is confirmed by the quasiclassical calculations. The PH induced by circularly polarized laser pulses provides a tool to resolve the electron dynamics and explore the spatial information of molecular structures.

Using a finite-difference time-domain method, we theoretically investigate the optical spectra of crossing perpendicular photonic crystal waveguides with quantum dots embedded in the central rod. The waveguides are designed so that the light mainly propagates along one direction and the cross talk is greatly reduced in the transverse direction. It is shown that when a quantum dot (QD) is resonant with the cavity, strong coupling can be observed via both the transmission and crosstalk spectrum. If the cavity is far off-resonant from the QD, both the cavity mode and the QD signal can be detected in the transverse direction since the laser field is greatly suppressed in this direction. This structure could have strong implications for resonant excitation and in-plane detection of QD optical spectroscopy.

We report a new quantum path interference effect of electron trajectories in high-order harmonic generation (HHG) from two-center molecules, in which the interference minima are mainly located in the high-energy portion of HHG spectrum. The quantum calculations of the time-frequency analyses and the classical results of the electron trajectories demonstrate very good agreement and reveal that the positions of the interference minima are associated with the cutoff of various kinds of molecular electron trajectories. The interference fringes within a half optical cycle can be clearly seen in the time-frequency analysis spectrum. Moreover, the characteristics of both the HHG in frequency domain and the corresponding attosecond pulse generation in time domain permit tracing back the interference information of these electron trajectories. These interference phenomena offer new possibilities for getting insight into the attosecond electronic dynamics in molecules.

We investigate the transmitted spectra of a few-cycle ultrashort pulse in an inversion-asymmetric medium with a permanent dipole moment (PDM). Our results show that even-order harmonics can be generated in this medium. Moreover, the generated even-order harmonics depend strongly on the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of initial incident few-cycle ultrashort pulses. Physical analysis of the re-emitted spectra of the medium reveals that the CEP-dependent spectral effect is originated from the inversion-asymmetric structure and the corresponding PDM effects: two-photon transition dominates in the nonlinear process and further induces the generations of the even-order harmonics. Furthermore, the orientation relation between the electric field peak of the pulse and the PDM results in even-order harmonic generations depending on the CEP.

We investigate the higher spectral component generations driven by a few-cycle laser pulse in a dense medium when a static electric field is present. Our results show that, when assisted by a static electric field, the dependence of the transmitted laser spectrum on the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) is significantly increased. Continuum and distinct peaks can be achieved by controlling the CEP of the few-cycle ultrashort laser pulse. Such a strong variation is due to the fact that the presence of the static electric field modifies the waveform of the combined electric field, which further affects the spectral distribution of the generated higher spectral components.

We theoretically propose a method of generating a single sub-100 attosecond (as) pulse with a two-colour time-gating laser field. The field is synthesized by an 8 fs/800 nm (three optical cycles) pulse and a 24 fs/2400 nm (three optical cycles) pulse with an optimal time delay between them. In our simulation, we obtain a supercontinuum with an extremely broad spectrum of 150 eV and generate an isolated attosecond pulse with 96 as pulse duration without any dispersion compensation.

We theoretically demonstrate the generation of extreme ultraviolet supercontinua in an orthogonally polarized two-color few-cycle laser field. We show that the ionized electrons can be driven back to their parent ion after traveling along curved trajectories in a plane perpendicular to the beam propagation direction, giving rise to a train of attosecond pulses at different polarization angles. A single isolated attosecond pulse can be obtained by blocking the low-order high harmonics, which contribute to the formation of the satellite pulses.