Manipulating helical phase of HHG vortex with atomic states

Abstract

By deploying the strong-field approximation theory, we perform numerical simulation on atomic high-order harmonic generation (HHG) of hydrogen and HHG vortices generated by hydrogen layer. Our results show that the atomic HHG spectra demonstrate peak-shifting and the helical phase of the HHG vortex can be manipulated with initial states of atoms, all ionized by oppositely polarized bicircular ω and 2ω Laguerre–Gaussian fields. The HHG peaks shift to higher frequency by ω if the initial state is switched from ψ100 to ψ211 , and the HHG peaks shift to lower frequency by ω if the initial state is switched from ψ100 to ψ21−1 , the final state is always the ground state ψ100 . The helical phase patterns of the HHG vortices are investigated in connection with the atomic HHG peak-shifting and the angular momentum conservation law. In addition, we observe that the fourth HHG harmonic is strongly dependent on the 2ω field but weakly on the ω field for an initial atomic state of magnetic quantum number −1.