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High-order harmonic generation from Rydberg atoms driven by plasmonic-enhanced laser fields

We theoretically investigate high-order harmonic generation (HHG) in Rydberg atoms driven by spatially inhomogeneous laser fields, induced, for instance, by plasmonic enhancement. It is well known that the laser intensity should to exceed certain threshold in order to generate HHG, when noble gas atoms in their ground state are used as an active medium. One way to enhance the coherent light coming from a conventional laser oscillator is to take advantage of the amplification obtained by the so-called surface plasmon polaritons, created when a low intensity laser field is focused onto a metallic nanostructure. The main limitation of this scheme is the low damage threshold of the materials employed in the nanostructures engineering. In this work we propose to use Rydberg atoms, driven by spatially inhomogeneous, plasmonic-enhanced laser fields, for HHG. We exhaustively discuss the behaviour and efficiency of these systems in the generation of coherent harmonic emission. To this aim we numerically solve the time-dependent Schrödinger equation for an atom with an electron initially in a highly excited $n$-th Rydberg state, located in the vicinity of a metallic nanostructure, where the electric field changes spatially on the scales relevant for the dynamics of the laser-ionized electron. We first use a one-dimensional model to investigate the phenomena systematically. We then employ a more realistic situation, when the interaction of a plasmonic-enhanced laser field with a three-dimensional Hydrogen atom is modelled. We discuss the scaling of the relevant input parameters with the principal quantum number $n$ of the Rydberg state in question, and demonstrate that harmonic emission could be achieved from Rydberg atoms well below the damage threshold, thus without deteriorating the geometry and properties of the metallic nanostructure.