Temporal characterization of tunable few-cycle vacuum ultraviolet pulses

Le résumé fourni par la source

Abstract In the past few decades, the development of ultrafast lasers has revolutionized our ability to gain insight into light–matter interactions. The emergence of few-cycle light sources operating from the visible to the mid-infrared spectral range—as well as attosecond extreme ultraviolet and X-ray technologies—provide the possibility to directly observe and control ultrafast electron dynamics in matter on their natural timescale; however, the temporal characterization of few-femtosecond sources in the deep ultraviolet (4–6 eV, 300–200 nm) and the vacuum ultraviolet (VUV; 6–12 eV, 200–100 nm) spectral regions is challenging. Here we fully characterize the temporal shape of microjoule-energy VUV pulses tuned between 160 and 190 nm generated via resonant dispersive wave emission during soliton self-compression in a capillary using frequency-resolved optical gating based on two-photon photoionization in noble gases. The in situ measurements reveal that in most of the cases the pulses are shorter than 3 fs. These findings pave the way toward investigating ultrafast electron dynamics and valence excitation of a large class of atoms and molecules with a time-resolution that has been hitherto inaccessible when using VUV pulses.

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