Techniques to generate intense isolated attosecond pulses from relativistic plasma mirrors

Abstract

Doppler harmonic generation of a high-power laser on a relativistic plasma mirror is a promising path to produce bright attosecond light bursts. Yet, a major challenge has been to find a way to generate isolated attosecond pulses, better suited to timed-resolved experiments, rather than trains of pulses. A promising technique is the attosecond lighthouse effect, which consists in imprinting different propagation directions to successive attosecond pulses of the train, and then spatially filtering one pulse in the far field. However, in the relativistic regime, plasma mirrors get curved by the radiation pressure of the incident laser and thus focus the generated harmonic beams. This increases the harmonic beam divergence and makes it difficult to separate the attosecond pulses angularly. In this article, we propose two novel techniques readily applicable in experiments to significantly reduce the divergence of Doppler harmonics, and achieve the generation of isolated attosecond pulses from the lighthouse effect without requiring few-cycle laser pulses. Their validity is demonstrated using state-of-the-art simulations, which show that isolated attosecond pulses with $10$TW peak power in the X-UV range can be generated with PW-class lasers. These techniques can equally be applied to other generation mechanisms to alleviate the constraints on the duration on the laser pulses needed to generate isolated attosecond pulses.