Two-color pump of laser plasmas for harmonic generation

Abstract

Various laser-produced metal plasmas were used for high-order sum and difference harmonic generation using the mixing of tunable mid-infrared pulses from optical parametric amplifier and 810 nm ultrashort pulses. We show that, regardless of non-optimal spatio-temporal overlap of two sources of radiation in the plasmas, the application of proposed technique allows a significant growth of harmonic yield and broadening of the number of different combinations of interacting waves in the extreme ultraviolet region, which could be useful for observation of the resonance induced enhancement of some frequency components.