New frontiers in Attosecond Science

Attosecond science is a young field of research that has rapidly evolved over the past decade. Performing time-resolved measurements with attosecond precision is a significant challenge. The rapid progress in this field opened a door into a new area of research that allows one to observe multi-electron dynamics. Currently, two main approaches have been successfully demonstrated. The first approach, Attosecond Pump-Probe Spectroscopy, applies an attosecond pulse to initiate or probe a fast-evolving process. An alternative approach, Attosecond Self-Imaging, applies the attosecond production process, to perform the measurement.

Although attosecond spectroscopy holds great promise for both measurement and control of matter, the understanding and implementation of most processes pose significant challenges. The extreme nonlinear nature of the interaction offers numerous channels, strongly coupled by the strong laser field, in which electronic dynamics can evolve.

In the talk I will review some of the main challenges and goals in the field of attosecond science. I will describe advanced schemes in attosecond spectroscopy where the interaction is probed via several synchronized fields. Such integration probes the multidimensional nature of the interaction, thus revealing its complexity. I will then focus on a new direction that integrates the two main branches in attosecond spectroscopy – the attosecond pump-probe scheme with the self-imaging approach.  This scheme increases the dimensionality in both the measurement and control of attosecond scale processes, allowing the observation of a wide range of multielectron phenomena.