Ultrashort laser pulse interaction with solid contains an abundant electronic dynamic process. When the laser pulse width reached few-cycle area, surface damage behaviors can reflect the initial light-electron interaction. In this work, we employed an ultrashort laser source to investigate damage behavior on solid. We investigate the potential of the multi-plate medium to generate broad supercontinuum and few-cycle pulses from a relatively high peak and average power Yb solid-state laser source in a single-pass double-stage multi-plate supercontinuum setup. The experiments were performed by focusing the output from a Yb3+: KGW regenerative amplifier, producing pulses from energy of 600mJ(1kHz) and a duration of 170 fs(~5ps tunable), through a set of thin fused silica plates with individual thicknesses of 1mm to 2mm. This resulted in pulse width of 15fs-25fs (4 cycles-7 cycles) continuous tunable laser source to investigate the laser-induced damage behavior of ZnSe and Fused silica. The damage mechanism and damage threshold are explained in the context of the Keldysh theory and critical electron density.
High-order harmonic generation (HHG), resulting from the interaction of an intense laser field with an atomic or molecular gas, has been of great importance to the study of ultrafast dynamics for more than two decades. In the last several years, HHG has been observed in condensed matter systems driven by intense mid-infrared lasers. Investigations of HHG from solids can offer new capabilities for studying electronic structure and ultrafast carrier dynamics in photo-excited materials. However, HHG from solids is not yet well-understood, and even the generation mechanism cannot be uniquely determined in many systems. In this paper, we experimentally investigate HHG driven in solids by a high-power femtosecond optical parametric amplifier, producing mid-IR driving pulses with tunable central wavelength and >10 μJ pulse energy. We generate coherent high order harmonic radiation in ZnO and Si crystals, and characterize the dependence of the harmonic spectrum on the 3D crystal orientation. We further compress the driving pulse duration to below three optical cycles and investigate the resulting high-order harmonic spectrum. Moreover, we investigate the potential to generate harmonics in novel materials with the goal of probing the ultrafast dynamics arising from strong-field photo-excitation in such materials.
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