Sunday, February 17, 2013
Room 306 (Hynes Convention Center)
We report theory and experimental results for a new class of phenomena in condensed matter optics when strong optical fields reversibly change the solid within an optical period. Such fields, if adiabatic, cause phenomena such as the Wannier-Stark localization and anticrossings of adiabatic levels. During a single-oscillation strong optical pulse, a dielectric undergoes a reversible transition to a semi-metal, which follows the instantaneous optical field during time intervals on order of hundred attoseconds. Such a pulse drives currents in dielectrics and controls their properties, including optical absorption and reflection, and extreme UV absorption in a non-perturbative manner. Applied to a metal, such optical pulse causes an instantaneous and reversible loss of the metallic properties. These phenomena offer potential for petahertz-bandwidth signal processing