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We present transient absorption spectra of an extreme ultraviolet attosecond pulse train in helium dressed by an 800 nm laser field with intensity ranging from $2\times10^{12}$ W/cm$^2$ to $2\times10^{14}$ W/cm$^2$. The energy range probed spans 16-42 eV, straddling the first ionisation energy of helium (24.59 eV). By changing the relative polarisation of the dressing field with respect to the attosecond pulse train polarisation we observe a large change in the modulation of the absorption reflecting the vectorial response to the dressing field. With parallel polarized dressing and probing fields, we observe significant modulations with periods of one half and one quarter of the dressing field period. With perpendicularly polarized dressing and probing fields, the modulations of the harmonics above the ionisation threshold are significantly suppressed. A full-dimensionality solution of the single-atom time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation obtained using the recently developed ab-initio time-dependent B-spline ADC method reproduce some of our observations., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures

We study theoretically the photoelectron emission in noble gases using plasmonic enhanced near-fields. We demonstrate that these fields have a great potential to generate high energy electrons by direct mid-infrared laser pulses of the current femtosecond oscillator. Typically, these fields appear in the surroundings of plasmonic nanostructures, having different geometrical shape such as bow-ties, metallic waveguides, metal nanoparticles and nanotips, when illuminated by a short laser pulse. In here, we consider metal nanospheres, in which the spatial decay of the near-field of the isolated nanoparticle can be approximated by an exponential function according to recent attosecond streaking measurements. We establish that the strong nonhomogeneous character of the enhanced near-field plays an important role in the above threshold ionization (ATI) process and leads to a significant extension in the photoelectron spectra. In this work, we employ the time dependent Schr\"odinger equation in reduced dimensions to calculate the photoelectron emission of xenon atoms in such enhanced near-field. Our findings are supported by classical calculations.

We present theoretical investigations of high-order harmonic generation (HHG) resulting from the interaction of noble gases with localized surface plasmons. These plasmonic fields are produced when a metal nanoparticle is subject to a few-cycle laser pulse. The enhanced field, which largely depends on the geometrical shape of the metallic structure, has a strong spatial dependency. We demonstrate that the strong non-homogeneity of this laser field plays an important role in the HHG process and leads to a significant increase of the harmonic cut-off energy. In order to understand and characterize this new feature, we include the functional form of the laser electric field obtained from recent attosecond streaking experiments [F. S{\"u}{\ss}mann and M. F. Kling, Proc. of SPIE, {\bf Vol. 8096}, 80961C (2011)] in the time dependent Schr\"odinger equation (TDSE). By performing classical simulations of the HHG process we show consistency between them and the quantum mechanical predictions. These allow us to understand the origin of the extended harmonic spectra as a selection of particular trajectory sets. The use of metal nanoparticles shall pave a completely new way of generating coherent XUV light with a laser field which characteristics can be synthesized locally., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures