Ionization by relativistically intense short laser pulses is studied in the framework of strong-field quantum electrodynamics. Distinctive patterns are found in the energy probability distributions of photoelectrons. Except of the already observed patterns, which were studied in Phys. Rev. A {\bf 94}, 013402 (2016), we discover an additional interference-free smooth supercontinuum in the high-energy portion of the spectrum, reaching tens of kiloelectronovolts. As we show, the latter is sensitive to the driving field intensity and it can be detected in a narrow polar-angular window. Once these high-energy electrons are collected, they can form solitary attosecond pulses. This is particularly important in light of various applications of attosecond electron beams such as in ultrafast electron diffraction and crystallography, or in time-resolved electron microscopy of physical, chemical, and biological processes.
We develop the two-electron attosecond streak camera under realistic conditions using a quasi-classical model. We assume extreme ultra-violet (XUV) attosecond pulses with a full width at half maximum (FWHM) of 24 attoseconds, centered at 120 eV and a streaking infrared laser field of 1600 nm, and intensity of $1.8 \times 10^{12}$ W/cm$^2$. The proposed method is shown to be capable to time resolve intra-atomic collisions in double ionization.
Attosecond pulses can be used to initiate and control electron dynamics on a sub-femtosecond time scale. The first step in this process occurs when an atom absorbs an ultraviolet photon leading to the formation of an attosecond electron wave packet (EWP). Until now, attosecond pulses have been used to create free EWPs in the continuum, where they quickly disperse. In this paper we use a train of attosecond pulses, synchronized to an infrared (IR) laser field, to create a series of EWPs that are below the ionization threshold in helium. We show that the ionization probability then becomes a fun…
We show that time ordering underlying time-dependent quantum dynamics is a physical observable accessible by attosecond streaking. We demonstrate the extraction of time ordering for the prototypical case of time-resolved two-photon double ionization (TPDI) of helium by an attosecond XUV pulse. The Eisenbud-Wigner-Smith time delay for the emission of a two-electron wavepacket and the time interval between subsequent emission events can be unambiguously determined by attosecond streaking. The delay between the two emission events sensitively depends on the energy, pulse duration, and angular dis…
Exchange correlation plays an important role in double-ionization of complex atoms by ultrashort laser pulse. In this work, we investigate two-photon double inner-shell electron ionization of neon induced by an attosecond extreme ultraviolent pulse in the framework of the quantum master equation. Our simulations reveal a distinct non-sequential effect via broadened double peaks, as a result of energy sharing between the two ionized electrons. When dissipation is included to show the interplay of coherence and decoherence, the two-photon double-ionization scaling law breaks down. We further stu…
We investigate the possibility to monitor the dynamics of autoionizing states in real time and control the yields of different ionization channels in helium by simulating XUV-pump IR-probe experiments focused on the N=2 threshold. The XUV pulse creates a coherent superposition of doubly excited states which is found to decay by ejecting electrons in bursts. Prominent interference fringes in the photoelectron angular distribution of the $2s$ and $2p$ ionization channels are observed, along with sizable out-of-phase quantum beats in the yields of the corresponding parent ions.
Strong-field ionization (SFI) has been shown to prepare wave packets with few-femtosecond periods. Here, we explore whether this technique can be extended to the attosecond time scale. We introduce an intuitive model for predicting the bandwidth of ionic states that can be coherently prepared by SFI. This bandwidth is given by the Fourier-transformed sub-cycle SFI rate and decreases considerably with increasing central wavelength of the ionizing pulse. Many-body calculations based on time-dependent configuration-interaction singles (TDCIS) quantitatively support this result and reveal an addit…
The ionization of atoms with sequences of attosecond pulses gives rise to excited ionic states that are entangled with the emitted photoelectron. Still, the ionic ensemble preserves some coherence that can be controlled through the laser parameters. In helium, control of the $2s/2p$ He$^+$ coherence is mediated by the autoionizing states below the $N=2$ threshold [Phys. Rev. Res. {\bf 3}, 023233 (2021)]. In the present work we study the role of the resonances both below and above the $N=3$ threshold on the coherence of the $N=3$ He$^+$ ion, in the attosecond pump-probe ionization of the helium…
We propose a new scenario to apply IR-pump-XUV-probe schemes to resolving strong field ionization induced and attosecond pulse driven electron-hole dynamics and coherence in real time. The coherent driving of both the infrared laser and the attoscond pulse correlates the dynamics of the core-hole and the valence-hole which leads to the otherwise forbidden absorption and emission of XUV photon. An analytical model is developed based on the strong-field approximation by taking into account of the essential multielectron configurations. The emission spectra from the core-valence transition and th…
We investigate two-photon double ionization of helium by intense ($10^{15} W/cm^2$) ultrashort ($\approx 300$ as) soft X-ray pulses (E = 91.6 eV). The time-dependent two-electron Schrödinger equation is solved using a coupled channel method. We show that for ultrashort pulses the angular distribution of ejected electrons depends on the pulse duration and provides novel insights into the role of electron correlations in the two-electron photoemission process. The angular distribution at energies near the ``independent electron'' peaks is close to dipolar while it acquires in the ``valley'' of c…
We present the first demonstration of two-photon double ionization of neon using an intense extreme ultraviolet (XUV) attosecond pulse train (APT) in a photon energy regime where both direct and sequential mechanisms are allowed. For an APT generated through high-order harmonic generation (HHG) in argon we achieve a total pulse energy close to 1 $μ$J, a central energy of 35 eV and a total bandwidth of $\sim30$ eV. The APT is focused by broadband optics in a neon gas target to an intensity of $3\cdot10^{12} $W$\cdot$cm$^{-2}$. By tuning the photon energy across the threshold for the sequential …
The dissociation dynamics of diatomic molecules interacting with (near) optical laser pulses of different duration is investigated by an elaborate discussion of the electric field of the laser and by a direct solution of the time-dependent molecular Schrödinger equation. The systematic variation of the pulse duration from the electronic time scale (attoseconds) to the nuclear time scale (femtoseconds) shows that the employed few-cycle laser pulses lead to well-known but quite different dissociation mechanisms. A comparative calculation with a model pulse and an experimentally realized attoseco…
Imaging in real time the complete dynamics of a process as fundamental as photoemission has long been out of reach due to the difficulty of combining attosecond temporal resolution with fine spectral and angular resolutions. Here, we achieve full decoding of the intricate angle-dependent dynamics of a photoemission process in helium, spectrally and anisotropically structured by twophoton transitions through intermediate bound states. Using spectrally- and angularly-resolved attosecond electron interferometry, we characterize the complex-valued transition probability amplitude towards the photo…
We explore stimulated photo-association in the context of attosecond pump-probe schemes of atomic matter. An attosecond pulse -- the probe -- is used to induce photo-association of an electronic wave packet which had been created before, typically with an attosecond pump pulse at an atomic center different from the one of photo-association. We will show that the electron absorption is maximal for a certain delay between the pulses. Two ways of enhancing and controlling stimulated photo-association are proposed, namely using an additional infrared pulse to steer the electronic wave packet and u…
Using attoscience, we study the electron correlations responsible for Auger decay in krypton atoms. The Auger decay is induced by a pulse train or a twin pulse composed of subpulses of attosecond duration. During the Auger decay an optical dressing laser may be present. Interference effects between the ejected Auger electron wave packets are predicted.
High-order harmonic generation by few-cycle 800 nm laser pulses in neon gas in the presence of a strong terahertz (THz) field is investigated numerically with propagation effects taken into account. Our calculations show that the combination of THz fields with up to 12 fs laser pulses can be an effective gating technique to generate single attosecond pulses. We show that in the presence of the strong THz field only a single attosecond burst can be phase matched, whereas radiation emitted during other half-cycles disappears during propagation. The cutoff is extended and a wide supercontinuum ap…
Light-induced states are commonly observed in the photoionization spectra of laser-dressed atoms. The properties of autoionizing polaritons, entangled states of light and Auger resonances, however, are largely unexplored. We employ attosecond transient-absorption spectroscopy to study the evolution of autoionizing states in argon, dressed by a tunable femtosecond laser pulse. The avoided crossings between the $3s^{-1}4p$ and several light-induced states indicates the formation of polariton multiplets. We measure a controllable stabilization of the polaritons against ionization, in excellent ag…
We perform a detailed analysis of how high-order harmonic generation (HHG) and above-threshold ionization (ATI) can be controlled by a time-delayed attosecond-pulse train superposed to a strong, near-infrared laser field. In particular we show that the high-harmonic and photoelectron intensities, the high-harmonic plateau structure and cutoff energies, and the ATI angular distributions can be manipulated by changing this delay. This is a direct consequence of the fact that the attosecond pulse train can be employed as a tool for constraining the instant an electronic wave packet is ejected in …
We study resonant two-photon ionization of helium atoms via the $1s3p$, $1s4p$ and $1s5p^1$P$_1$ states using the 15$^\mathrm{th}$ harmonic of a titanium-sapphire laser for the excitation and a weak fraction of the laser field for the ionization. The phase of the photoelectron wavepackets is measured by an attosecond interferometric technique, using the 17$^\mathrm{th}$ harmonic. We perform experiments with angular resolution using a velocity map imaging spectrometer and with high energy resolution using a magnetic bottle electron spectrometer. Our results are compared to calculations using th…
We study the higher-harmonic generation (HHG) using elliptically polarized two-color driving fields. The HHG via bi-chromatic counter-rotating laser fields is a promising source of circularly polarized ultrashort XUV radiation at the attosecond time scale. The ellipticity or the polarization of the attosecond pulses can be tweaked by modifying the emitted harmonics' ellipticity, which can be controlled by varying the driver fields. We propose a simple setup to control the polarization of the driving fields, which eventually changes the ellipticity of the attosecond pulses. A well-defined scali…
We present a theoretical study of the photoelectron attosecond beating at the basis of RABBIT (Reconstruction of Attosecond Beating By Interference of Two-photon transitions) in the presence of autoionizing states. We show that, as a harmonic traverses a resonance, its sidebands exhibit a peaked phase shift as well as a modulation of the beating frequency itself. Furthermore, the beating between two resonant paths persists even when the pump and the probe pulses do not overlap, thus providing a sensitive non-holographic interferometric means to reconstruct coherent metastable wave packets. We …
To measure and control the electron motion in atoms and molecules by the strong laser field on the attosecond time scale is one of the research frontiers of atomic and molecular photophysics. It involves many new phenomena and processes and raises a series of questions of concepts, theories and methods. Recent studies show that the Coulomb potential can cause the ionization time lag (about 100 attoseconds) between instants of the field maximum and the ionization-rate maximum. This lag can be understood as the response time of the electronic wave function to the strong-field-induced ionization …
We report on the first streaking measurement of water-window attosecond pulses generated via high harmonic generation, driven by sub-2-cycle, CEP-stable, 1850 nm laser pulses. Both the central photon energy and the energy bandwidth far exceed what has been demonstrated thus far, warranting the investigation of the attosecond streaking technique for the soft X-ray regime and the limits of the FROGCRAB retrieval algorithm under such conditions. We also discuss the problem of attochirp compensation and issues regarding much lower photo-ionization cross sections compared with the XUV in addition t…
Spectra of circularly polarized harmonics is calculated by numerically solving the Time-Dependent Schrödinger Equation for a 2D model of Ne atom using circularly polarized fundamental with counter-rotating second harmonic laser fields. We demonstrate strong asymmetry between left- and right- circularly polarized harmonics when a ground state with p-type symmetry is used. It arises due to the circular polarization of individual attosecond pulses in the generated pulse train. Reducing the length of the counter-rotating drivers and introducing a small time-shift between them allows to generate a …
A new method to coherently control the electron dynamics is proposed using a few-cycle laser pulse in combination with a controlling field. It is shown that this method not only broadens the attosecond pulse bandwidth, but also reduces the chirp, then an isolated 80-as pulse is straightforwardly obtained and even shorter pulse is achievable by increasing the intensity of the controlling field. Such ultrashort pulses allow one to investigate ultrafast electronic processes which have never be achieved before. In addition, the few-cycle synthesized pulse is expected to manipulate a wide range of …
We examine the archetype of an interference experiment for Auger electrons: two electron wave packets are launched by inner-shell ionizing a krypton atom using two attosecond light pulses with a variable time delay. This setting is an attosecond realization of the Ramsey method of separated oscillatory fields. Interference of the two ejected Auger-electron wave packets is predicted, indicating that the coherence between the two pulses is passed to the Auger electrons. For the detection of the interference pattern an accurate coincidence measurement of photo- and Auger electrons is necessary. T…
The kinetic energy distribution of D$^+$ ions resulting from the interaction of a femtosecond laser pulse with D$_2$ molecules is calculated based on the rescattering model. From analyzing the molecular dynamics, it is shown that the recollision time between the ionized electron and the D$_2^+$ ion can be read from the D$^+$ kinetic energy peaks to attosecond accuracy. We further suggest that more precise reading of the clock can be achieved by using shorter fs laser pulses (about 15fs).
In this work we demonstrate the generation of two intense, ultrafast laser pulses that allow a controlled interferometric measurement of higher harmonic generation pulses with 12.8 attoseconds in resolution (half the atomic unit of time) and a precision as low as 680 zeptoseconds ($10^{-21}$ seconds). We create two replicas of a driving femtosecond pulse which share the same optical path except at the focus where they converge to two foci. An attosecond pulse train emerges from each focus through the process of HHG. The two attosecond pulse trains from each focus interfere in the far field pro…
High-order harmonic generation from atomic systems is considered in the crossed fields of a relativistically strong infrared laser and a weak attosecond-pulse train of soft x-rays. Due to one-photon ionization by the x-ray pulse, the ionized electron obtains a starting momentum that compensates the relativistic drift which is induced by the laser magnetic field, and allows the electron to efficiently emit harmonic radiation upon recombination with the atomic core in the relativistic regime. In this way, short pulses of coherent hard x-rays of up to 40 keV energy and 10 as duration can be broug…
We present a general description of the interaction between multi-color laser pulses and atoms and molecules, focusing on the experimentally relevant example of infrared (IR) pulses overlapped with attosecond pulse trains (APTs). This formulation reveals explicitly and analytically the role of the delay between the IR pulse and APT as a coherent control parameter. Our formulation also shows the nearly equivalent roles of the delay and the carrier-envelope phase in controlling the interference between different multiphoton pathways. We illustrate these points by investigating the single ionizat…
We illustrate how attosecond light pulses can be used to directly mapping out the time-dependence of the correlated motion of two excited atomic electrons, discuss how the two-electron correlations manifest themselves in realistic attosecond measurements, and propose the following for experimental exploration: (a) The single ionization signals which directly reveal bending-vibrational motion of the correlated electron pair, (b) and also its rotational motion. (c) The double ionization signals which directly reveal the two-electron density in momentum space. To facilitate the description of the…
We demonstrate sub-cycle control of frustrated double ionization (FDI) in the two-electron triatomic molecule D$_3^+$ when driven by two orthogonally polarized two-color laser fields. We employ a three-dimensional semi-classical model that fully accounts for the electron and nuclear motion in strong fields. We control FDI triggered by a strong near-infrared laser field with a weak mid-infrared laser field. This control as a function of the time delay between the two pulses is demonstrated when the FDI probability and the distribution of the momentum of the escaping electron along the mid-infra…
Attosecond Pulse Trains (APT) generated by high-harmonic generation (HHG) of high-intensity near-infrared (IR) laser pulses have proven valuable for studying the electronic dynamics of atomic and molecular species. However, the high intensities required for high-photon-energy, high-flux HHG usually limit the class of adequate laser systems to repetition rates below 10~kHz. Here, APT's generated from the 100 kHz, 160 W, 40 fs laser system (HR1) of the Extreme Light Infrastructure Attosecond Light Pulse Source (ELI-ALPS) are reconstructed using the Reconstruction of Attosecond Beating By Interfe…
We investigate the response of two three-body Coulomb systems when driven by attosecond half-cycle pulses: The hydrogen molecular ion and the helium atom. Using very short half-cycle pulses (HCPs) which effectively deliver ``kicks'' to the electrons, we first study how a carefully chosen sequence of HCPs can be used to control to which of one of the two fixed atomic centers the electron gets re-attached. Moving from one electron in two atomic centers to two electrons in one atomic center we then study the double ionization from the ground state of He by a sequence of attosecond time-scale HCPs…
Based on numerical solutions of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation for either one or two active electrons, we propose a method for observing instantaneous level shifts in an oscillating strong infrared (IR) field in time, using a single tunable attosecond pulse to probe excited states of the perturbed atom. The ionization probability in the combined fields depends on both, the frequency of the attosecond pulse and the time delay between both pulses, since the IR field shifts excited energy levels into and out of resonance with the attosecond probe pulse. We show that this method (i) allow…
Isolated attosecond pulses (IAP) generated by high-order harmonic generation are valuable tools that enable dynamics to be studied on the attosecond time scale. The applicability of these IAP would be widened drastically by increasing their energy. Here we analyze the potential of using multi-colour driving pulses for temporally gating the attosecond pulse generation process. We devise how this approach can enable the generation of IAP with the available high-energy kHz-repetition-rate Ytterbium-based laser amplifiers (delivering 180-fs, 1030-nm pulses). We show theoretically that this require…
The attosecond ultrafast ionization dynamics of correlated two- or many-electron systems have, so far, been mainly addressed investigating atomic systems. In the case of single ionization, it is well known that electron-electron correlation modifies the ionization dynamics and observables beyond the single active electron picture, resulting in effects such as the Auger effect or shake-up/down and knock-up/down processes. Here, we extend these works by investigating the attosecond ionization of a molecular system involving correlated two-electron dynamics, as well as non-adiabatic nuclear dynam…
Ab initio simulations of a range of interferometric experiments are used to identify a strong dependence on multiphoton phase shifts in above-threshold ionization. A simple rule of thumb for interaction phase shifts is derived to explain both the conservation of photoelectron yield and its absolute CEP-dependence. For instance, it is found that interferometric above-threshold ionization experiments are shifted by $π/4$ relative to RABBIT experiments, and that there is no RABBIT-term in a laser-assisted photoionization experiment with odd and even harmonics. Thus, our work helps to resolve the …
A universal mechanism of ultrafast two-electron orbital swap is discovered through two-photon sequential double ionization of Li. After a $1s$ electron in Li is ionized by absorbing an EUV photon, the other two bound electrons located on two different shells have either parallel or antiparallel spin orientations. In the latter case, these two electrons are in the superposition of the singlet and triplet states with different energies, forming a quantum beat and giving rise to the two-electron orbital swap with a period of several hundred attoseconds. The orbital swap mechanism can be used to m…
Recent experimental developments of high-intensity, short-pulse XUV light sources are enhancing our ability to study electron-electron correlations. We perform time-dependent calculations to investigate the so-called "sequential" regime (photon energy above 54.4 eV) in the two-photon double ionization of helium. We show that attosecond pulses allow to induce and probe angular and energy correlations of the emitted electrons. The final momentum distribution reveals regions dominated by the Wannier ridge break-up scenario and by post-collision interaction.
We simulate the transient absorption of attosecond pulses of infrared-laser-dressed atoms by considering a three-level system with the adiabatic approximation. The delay-dependent interference features are investigated from the perspective of the coherent interaction processes between the attosecond pulse and the quasi-harmonics. We find that many features of the interference fringes in the absorption spectra of the attosecond pulse can be attributed to the coherence phase difference. However, the modulation signals of laser-induced sidebands of the dark state is found related to the populatio…
The possibility of achieving highly selective excitation of low metastable states of hydrogen and helium atoms by using short laser pulses with reasonable parameters is demonstrated theoretically. Interactions of atoms with the laser field are studied by solving the close-coupling equations without discretization. The parameters of laser pulses are calculated using different kinds of optimization procedures. For the excitation durations of hundreds of femtoseconds direct optimization of the parameters of one and two laser pulses with Gaussian envelopes is used to introduce a number of simple s…
Ultrafast processes in matter can be captured and even controlled by using sequences of few-cycle optical pulses, which need to be well characterized, both in amplitude and phase. The same degree of control has not yet been achieved for few-cycle extreme ultraviolet pulses generated by high-order harmonic generation in gases, with duration in the attosecond range. Here, we show that by varying the spectral phase and carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of a high-repetition rate laser, using dispersion in glass, we achieve a high degree of control of the relative phase and CEP between consecutive attos…
In recent publications, it has been shown that high-order harmonic generation can be manipulated by employing a time-delayed attosecond pulse train superposed to a strong, near-infrared laser field. It is an open question, however, which is the most adequate way to approximate the attosecond pulse train in a semi-analytic framework. Employing the Strong-Field Approximation and saddle-point methods, we make a detailed assessment of the spectra obtained by modeling the attosecond pulse train by either a monochromatic wave or a Dirac-Delta comb. These are the two extreme limits of a real train, w…
Parametric amplification of attosecond coherent pulses around 100 eV at the single-atom level is demonstrated for the first time by using the 3D time-dependent Schr{ö}dinger equation in high-harmonic generation processes from excited states of He$^+$. We present the attosecond dynamics of the amplification process far from the ionization threshold and resolve the physics behind it. The amplification of a particular central photon energy requires the seed XUV pulses to be perfectly synchronized in time with the driving laser field for stimulated recombination to the He$^+$ ground state and is o…
Various schemes are presented for the generation of circularly polarized molecular high-order harmonic generation (MHOHG) from molecules. In particular it is shown that combinations of counter-rotating circularly polarized pulses produce the lowest frequency Coriolis forces with the highest frequency recollisions, thus generating new harmonics which are the source of circular polarized attosecond pulses (CPAPs). These can be used to generate circularly polarized electronic currents in molecular media on attosecond time scale. Molecular attosecond currents allow then for the generation of ultra…
The attosecond high harmonic pulses obtained from a long Ar-filled gas cell were characterized by two techniques - the reconstruction of attosecond beating by interference of two-photon transition (RABITT) and frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG) methods. The pulse durations obtained by RABITT and FROG methods agreed within 10 %.
We propose a method for programmable shaping of the amplitude and phase of the XUV and x-ray attosecond pulses produced by high-order harmonic generation. It overcomes the bandwidth limitations of existing spectral filters and enables removal of the intrinsic attosecond chirp as well as the synthesis of pulse sequences. It is based on partial phase matching, such as quasi-phase matching, using a longitudinally addressable modulation.
We present a method of producing single attosecond pulses by high-order harmonic generation with multi-cycle nonlinear chirped driver laser pulses. The symmetry of the laser feld in several optical cycles near the pulse center is dramatically broken, and then the photons which cover a much broad spectrum burst almost only in one optical cycle. So an ultra-broad continuum spectrum appears in the high order harmonic spectrum, from which an isolated sub-50 attosecond pulse could be obtained. The results are almost independent of the length and chirp form of the driver laser pulse.
We study photoionization of argon atoms excited by attosecond pulses using an interferometric measurement technique. We measure the difference in time delays between electrons emitted from the $3s^2$ and from the $3p^6$ shell, at different excitation energies ranging from 32 to 42 eV. The determination of single photoemission time delays requires to take into account the measurement process, involving the interaction with a probing infrared field. This contribution can be estimated using an universal formula and is found to account for a substantial fraction of the measured delay.
Intense attosecond magnetic field pulses are predicted to be produced by intense few cycle circularly polarized UV pulses. Numerical solutions of the time dependent Schrödinger equation for H$_2^+$ are used to study the dynamical process. Spiralling attosecond circular electron wave packets are created with nanometer molecular dimensions, thus generating magnetic fields of several tens of Teslas ($10^5$ Gauss). Simulations show that the induced magnetic field is critically dependent on the pulse wavelength $λ$ and pulse duration $nτ$ ($n$ number of cycle) as predicted by a classical model. For…
The generation of coherent light pulses in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) spectral region with attosecond pulse durations constitutes the foundation of the field of attosecond science. Twenty years after the first demonstration of isolated attosecond pulses, they continue to be a unique tool enabling the observation and control of electron dynamics in atoms, molecules and solids. It has long been identified that an increase in the repetition rate of attosecond light sources is necessary for many applications in atomic and molecular physics, surface science, and imaging. Although high harmonic g…
The generation of the shortest isolated attosecond pulses requires both broad spectral bandwidth and control of the spectral phase. Rapid progress has been made in both aspects, leading to the generation of the world-record-shortest 67 as light pulses in 2012, and broadband attosecond continua covering a wide range of extreme ultraviolet and soft x-ray wavelengths. Such pulses have been successfully applied in photoelectron/photoion spectroscopy and the recently developed attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy to study electron dynamics in matter. In this Review, we discuss the significa…
A new method for efficiently generating an isolated single-cycle attosecond pulse is proposed. It is shown that the ultraviolet (UV) attosecond pulse can be utilized as a robust tool to control the dynamics of electron wave packets (EWPs). By adding a UV attosecond pulse to an infrared (IR) few-cycle pulse at a proper time, only one return of the EWP to the parent ion is selected to effectively contribute to the harmonics, then an isolated two-cycle 130-as pulse with a bandwidth of 45 eV is obtained. After complementing the chirp, an isolated single-cycle attosecond pulse with a duration less …