Extreme ultraviolet fractional orbital angular momentum beams from high harmonic generation

Turpin, A. , Rego, L., Picón, A., San Román, J. and Hernández-García, C. (2017) Extreme ultraviolet fractional orbital angular momentum beams from high harmonic generation. Scientific Reports, 7, 43888. (doi: 10.1038/srep43888) (PMID:28281655) (PMCID:PMC5345098)

Abstract

We investigate theoretically the generation of extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) beams carrying fractional orbital angular momentum. To this end, we drive high-order harmonic generation with infrared conical refraction (CR) beams. We show that the high-order harmonic beams emitted in the EUV/soft x-ray regime preserve the characteristic signatures of the driving beam, namely ringlike transverse intensity profile and CR-like polarization distribution. As a result, through orbital and spin angular momentum conservation, harmonic beams are emitted with fractional orbital angular momentum, and they can be synthesized into structured attosecond helical beams –or “structured attosecond light springs”– with rotating linear polarization along the azimuth. Our proposal overcomes the state of the art limitations for the generation of light beams far from the visible domain carrying non-integer orbital angular momentum and could be applied in fields such as diffraction imaging, EUV lithography, particle trapping, and super-resolution imaging.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: C.H.-G. acknowledges support from the Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship within the EU Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (2007–2013), under REA grant Agreement No. 328334. C.H.-G., and J.S.-R. acknowledge support from Junta de Castilla y León (Projects SA116U13, SA046U16) and MINECO (FIS2013-44174-P, FIS2016-75652-P). A.T. acknowledges support from the MECD (AP2010-2310), the MINECO (FIS2011-23719), the Catalan government (SGR2014-1639), and the Max Planck Society. A.P. acknowledges support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 702565.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Turpin, Dr Alejandro
• Authors: Turpin, A., Rego, L., Picón, A., San Román, J., and Hernández-García, C.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Journal Name: Scientific Reports
• Publisher: Nature Research
• ISSN: 2045-2322
• ISSN (Online): 2045-2322
• Published Online: 10 March 2017
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2017 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Scientific Reports 7:43888
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons license