Abstract

The application of laser pulses with supershort duration of the order of 10 fs has recently been proposed [1,2] for enhancement of high order harmonic emission and subfemtosecond pulse production in the soft X-ray range. Such short driving pulses contain only a small number of optical cycles and therefore high energy photon bursts are generated due to atom ionization at rapidly increasing field amplitudes. It is obvious that the efficiency of this process becomes dependent on the concrete field distribution over the pulse or, in the other words, on the absolute phase of the optical field.

© 1997 Optical Society of America