Analysis of high-harmonic generation in terms of complex Floquet spectral analysis

TL;DR

This paper presents a complex spectral analysis of high-harmonic generation in atoms driven by intense laser fields, revealing how Floquet states and their interference lead to photon emission and pulse formation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel complex spectral approach using extended Floquet-Hilbert space and Feshbach projection to analyze HHG and photon emission dynamics.

Findings

Eigenstates have complex eigenvalues indicating decay rates.

Photon emission is linked to resonance singularities in Floquet states.

Interference among Floquet states causes spatial pulse emission.

Abstract

Recent developments on intense laser sources is opening a new field of optical sciences. An intense coherent light beam strongly interacting with the matter causes a coherent motion of a particle, forming a strongly dressed excited particle. A photon emission from this dressed excited particle is a strong nonlinear process causing high-harmonic generation(HHG), where the perturbation analysis is broken down. In this work, we study a coherent photon emission from a strongly dressed excited atom in terms of complex spectral analysis in the extended Floquet-Hilbert-space. We have obtained the eigenstates of the total Hamiltonian with use of Feshbach-Brilloiun-Wigner projection method. In this extended space, the eigenstates of the total Hamiltonian consisting of the radiation field and the atom system have complex eigenvalues whose imaginary part represents the decay rate. Time evolution of the system is represented by the complex eigenvector expansion so that the correlation dynamics between the photon and the atom is fully taken into account. The HHG is interpreted as the irreversible spontaneous photon emission due to the resonance singularity in terms of the multiple Floquet states that are generated by periodic external field. We have found that the interference between the emitted photons over the different Floquet states causes spatial pulse emission correlated with the decay process of the excited atom.