Paul Corkum
Joint Attosecond Science Laboratory
University of Ottawa and National Research Council of Canada
100 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, ON, Canada
Attosecond pulse generation is understood through an electron wavepacket ionizing under the influence of an intense light pulse from an atom or molecule, propagating under the influence of the light’s electric field for a fraction of a period and then recombining to the state from which it ionized. The quantum trajectories that describe this motion map onto an interferometer – an electron interferometer created by light. I will show how we use this process to generate attosecond pulses.
One can add a weak additional field to perturb the quantum trajectories, thereby manipulating the interferometer. Using interferometric concepts, I will show howthis weak field allows us to measure the space-time properties of attosecond pulses and the space-time structure of electronic wave packets.