Paper detail

Extracting an electron's angle of return from shifted interference patterns in macroscopic high-harmonic spectra of diatomic molecules

We investigate high-order harmonic spectra from aligned diatomic molecules in intense driving fields whose components have orthogonal polarizations. We focus on how the driving-field ellipticity influences structural interference patterns in a macroscopic medium. In a previous publication [Phys. Rev. A 88, 023404 (2013)] we have shown that the non-vanishing ellipticity introduces an effective dynamic shift in the angle for which the two-center interference maxima and minima occur, with regard to the existing condition for linearly polarized fields. In this work we show through simulation that it is still possible to observe this shift in harmonic spectra that have undergone macroscopic propagation, and discuss the parameter range for doing so. These features are investigated for $H_2$ in a bichromatic field composed of two orthogonally polarized waves. The shift is visible both in the near- and in the far-field regime, so that, in principle, it can be observed in experiments.