News and views from the attosecond generation, characterization and applications frontier

Complete text of publication follows. We report on recent results in the generation, characterization and applications of energetic attosecond pulse trains and ultra-broad coherent XUV continua: 1) Generation: 1a) We report experimental results confirming contribution of both long and short trajectories in on-axis harmonic generation before, at and after an atomic gas jet, i.e. under three different phase matching conditions. The contribution of both trajectories is manifested through their interference leading to a modulated harmonic (and side band) yield as a function of the driving intensity. 1b) We report the generation of sub-fs pulse trains at the 40 μJ pulse energy level from laser surface plasma, measured through 2nd order intensity volume autocorrelation (2nd order IVAC). 2) Characterization: We present comparative studies between RABITT and 2nd order IVAC in on axis harmonic generation before, at and after an atomic gas jet. We find that the two techniques give fairly different results that are compatible with the differently weighted but unavoidable presence of the long and short trajectory in the generation process in all three phase matching conditions. We show that the relative contributions of the two trajectories can be estimated through RABITT measurements, while spatiotemporal mean pulse durations can be extracted from 2nd order IVAC traces. 3) Applications: 3a) We present time resolved VUV spectroscopy of ultrafast dynamics in molecular ethylene. 3b) We present time resolved XUV spectroscopy at the 1 fs temporal scale and ultra-broad band XUV Fourier Transform Spectroscopy in a manifold of doubly excited autoionizing and inner-shell Auger decaying states excited simultaneously through a coherent broadband XUV continuum. Acknowledgments. This work is supported in part by the European Community's Human Potential Program under contract MTKD-CT-2004-517145 (X-HOMES), the Ultraviolet Laser Facility (ULF) operating at FORTH-IESL (contract PHRI-CT-2001-00139), the ELI research infrastructure preparatory phase program, the FASTQUAST ITN, and the FLUX program of the 7th FP.