Tailoring a 67 attosecond pulse through advantageous phase-mismatch

A single isolated attosecond pulse of 67 as was composed from an extreme UV supercontinuum covering 55-130 eV generated by the double optical gating technique. Phase mismatch was used to exclude the single-atom cutoff of the spectrum that possesses unfavorable attochirp, allowing the positive attochirp of the remaining spectrum to be compensated by the negative dispersion of a zirconium foil. Two algorithms, PROOF and FROG-CRAB, were employed to retrieve the pulse from the experimental spectrogram, yielding nearly identical results. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America