Attosecond Optical and Ramsey-Type Interferometry by Postgeneration Splitting of Harmonic Pulse

Abstract

Time domain Ramsey-type interferometry is useful for investigating spectroscopic information of quantum states in atoms and molecules. The energy range of the quantum states to be observed with this scheme has now reached more than 20 eV by resolving the interference fringes with a period of a few hundred attoseconds. This attosecond Ramsey-type interferometry requires the irradiation of a coherent pair of extreme ultraviolet (XUV) light pulses, while all the methods used to deliver the coherent XUV pulse pair until now have relied on the division of the source of an XUV pulse in two before the generation. In this paper, we report on a novel technique to perform attosecond Ramsey-type interferometry by splitting an XUV high-order harmonic (HH) pulse of a sub-20 fs laser pulse after its generation. By virtue of the postgeneration splitting of the HH pulse, we demonstrated that the optical interference emerging at the complete temporal overlap of the HH pulse pair seamlessly continued to the Ramsey-type electronic interference in a helium atom. This technique is applicable for studying the femtosecond dephasing dynamics of electronic wavepackets and exploring the ultrafast evolution of a cationic system entangled with an ionized electron with sub-20 fs resolution.