Professor Andreas Becker
UC Boulder
Generation of elliptically polarized high order harmonics
Location: 1080 Physics Research Building
Faculty Host: Sasha Landsman
Abstract: Extreme ultraviolet and soft x-ray radiation are important light tools for studying the dynamics of fundamental processes in atoms, molecules and materials on ultrashort time scales. High harmonic generation provides the opportunity to produce such light in a tabletop experimental setting. For a long time, experiments generated and applied linearly polarized harmonics, only recently several methods have been proposed and demonstrated to overcome this limitation. In my talk I will review different scenarios used to generate elliptically polarized laser pulses, which have been used in applications ranging from observing molecular chirality to magnetic interactions. I will then focus on the specific set-up of cross-polarized bichromatic laser pulses and discuss numerical results that confirm earlier experimental observations of high-order harmonics with large ellipticities.
Bio: Dr. Andreas Becker is a Distinguished Professor at the Department of Physics and a Fellow of JILA at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. His group works on the theoretical analysis and numerical simulation of ultrafast phenomena in atoms, molecules and clusters interacting with intense laser pulses. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Quebec City and Sherbrooke (Canada) and as a group leader at the Max Plack Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (Dresden, Germany) before joining the University of Colorado. He is a Fellow of the APS and Optica and served as a Chair of JILA and currently as co-director of the JILA Physics Frontier Center.
