High-order harmonic generation from Rydberg states at fixed Keldysh parameter

TL;DR

This study uses quantum simulations to explore high-order harmonic generation from Rydberg states at a fixed Keldysh parameter, revealing universal spectral features and a secondary plateau formation as the principal quantum number increases.

Contribution

It demonstrates that HHG spectra exhibit universal behavior across Rydberg states when scaled appropriately, challenging the traditional reliance on the Keldysh parameter for regime classification.

Findings

The HHG cutoff scales predictably with increasing Rydberg state.

A secondary plateau with a new cutoff forms, splitting the HHG spectrum.

Spectral structures are universal for Rydberg states with n ≥ 10.

Abstract

Because the commonly adopted viewpoint that the Keldysh parameter $\gamma $ determines the dynamical regime in strong field physics has long been demonstrated to be misleading, one can ask what happens as relevant physical parameters, such as laser intensity and frequency, are varied while $\gamma$ is kept fixed. We present results from our one- and fully three-dimensional quantum simulations of high-order harmonic generation (HHG) from various bound states of hydrogen with $n$ up to 40, where the laser intensities and the frequencies are scaled from those for $n=1$ in order to maintain a fixed Keldysh parameter $\gamma$$< 1$ for all $n$. We find that as we increase $n$ while keeping $\gamma $ fixed, the position of the cut-off scales in well defined manner. Moreover, a secondary plateau forms with a new cut-off, splitting the HHG plateau into two regions. First of these sub-plateaus is composed of lower harmonics, and has a higher yield than the second one. The latter extends up to the semiclassical $I_p+3.17U_p$ cut-off. We find that this structure is universal, and the HHG spectra look the same for all $n\gtrsim 10$ when plotted as a function of the scaled harmonic order. We investigate the $n$-, $l$- and momentum distributions to elucidate the physical mechanism leading to this universal structure.