English

Bright continuously-tunable VUV source for ultrafast spectroscopy

Atomic Physics 2024-01-12 v2 Atomic and Molecular Clusters Optics

Abstract

Ultrafast electron dynamics drive phenomena such as photochemical reactions, catalysis, and light harvesting. To capture such dynamics in real-time, femtosecond to attosecond light sources are extensively used. However, an exact match between the excitation photon energy and a characteristic resonance is crucial. High-harmonic generation sources are exceptional in terms of pulse duration but limited in spectral tunability in the VUV range. Here, we present a monochromatic femtosecond source continuously tunable around 21 eV photon energy utilizing the second harmonic of an OPCPA laser system to drive high-harmonic generation. The unique tunability of the source is verified in an experiment probing the interatomic Coulombic decay in doped He nanodroplets across the He absorption bands. Moreover, we achieved intensities sufficient for driving non-linear processes using a tight focusing of the VUV beam. We demonstrated it on the observation of collective autoionization of multiply excited pure He nanodroplets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.10508,
  title  = {Bright continuously-tunable VUV source for ultrafast spectroscopy},
  author = {Lucie Jurkovičová and Ltaief Ben Ltaief and Andreas Hult Roos and Ondřej Hort and Ondřej Finke and Martin Albrecht and Ziaul Hoque and Eva Klimešová and Akgash Sundaralingam and Roman Antipenkov and Annika Grenfell and Alexandr Špaček and Wojciech Szuba and Maria Krikunova and Marcel Mudrich and Jaroslav Nejdl and Jakob Andreasson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.10508},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

12 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Nat. Commun

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:19:39.692Z