Speaker: Javier Argüello
Affiliation: UPC
Date: Thursday, 9 May 2024 at 12:00
Location: Seminar Room, Serrano 121 (CFMAC)
The demanding experimental access to the ultrafast dynamics of materials challenges our understanding of their electronic response to applied strong laser fields. For this purpose, trapped ultracold atoms with highly controllable potentials have become an enabling tool to describe phenomena in a scenario in which some effects are more easily accessible and 12 orders of magnitude slower [1]. In this work, we introduce a mapping between the parameters of attoscience platforms and atomic cloud simulators and propose an experimental protocol to access the emission spectrum of high-harmonic generation (HHG), a regime that has so far been elusive to cold-atom simulation [2]. We show that these platforms offer a unique opportunity to access and measure the emission spectrum of HHG through absorption measurements [3]. Furthermore, it simulates the physical response of a single-atom target. This is in contrast with real experiments, where thousands of atoms are simultaneously driven to collect enough photons to resolve the spectrum, which challenges phase-matching conditions when a large ionization occurs under strong fields. As we illustrate, the benchmark offered by these simulators can provide new insights into the conversion efficiency of extended and short nuclear potentials, as well as the response to applied elliptical polarized fields or ultrashort few-cycle pulses. [1] S. Sala, J. F¨orster, and A. Saenz, Ultracold-atom quantum simulator for attosecond science, Phys. Rev. A 95, 11403 (2017). [2] R. Senaratne, et al., Quantum simulation of ultrafast dynamics using trapped ultracold atoms, Nat. Commun. 9, 2065 (2018). [3] Javier Arg¨uello-Luengo, Javier Rivera-Dean, Philipp Stammer, Andrew S. Maxwell, David M. Weld, Marcelo F. Ciappina, and Maciej Lewenstein, PRX Quantum 5, 010328 (2024).