Interrogating the temporal coherence of EUV frequency combs with highly charged ions

Abstract

A scheme to infer the temporal coherence of EUV frequency combs generated from intra-cavity high-order harmonic generation is put forward. The excitation dynamics of highly charged Mg-like ions, interacting with EUV pulse trains featuring different carrier-envelope-phase fluctuations, are simulated. While demonstrating the microscopic origin of the macroscopic equivalence between excitations induced by pulse trains and continuous-wave lasers, we show that the coherence time of the pulse train can be determined from the spectrum of the excitations. The scheme will provide a verification of the comb temporal coherence at time scales several orders of magnitude longer than current state of the art, and at the same time will enable high-precision spectroscopy of EUV transitions with a relative accuracy up to $\delta \omega /\omega \sim 10^{-17}$.

6 pages, 3 figures and 1 table

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• XUV frequency comb operation in an astigmatism-compensated enhancement cavity