TRACING AND STEERING ELECTRON MOTION INSIDE ATOMS AND MOLECULES BY ATTOSECOND PULSES

With the fast development of intense laser technologies, a lot of new phenomena in la- ser-matter interactions have been experimentally observed and successfully explained by various theories and simulations. One of the specular processes is high-order harmonic generation (HHG), in which atoms and molecules can emit photons with energies equal to multiple of the fundamental laser photon energy. By synthesizing several neighboring orders of HHG spectra near its cutoff, experimentalists have been able to generate laser pulses of duration in the attosecond time scale (1 as = 10~(-18) s). The availability of attosecond pulses has opened a drastically new regime of ultrafast sciences, where it is possible for scientists to trace and control the motion of electrons on its natural scale. After the fruitful developments of femtosciences in the last two decades, the newly opened attosecond science is another big jump of human being to understand and control the internal dynamics of atoms and molecules. In this paper, we will give a brief review of what we have done in recent years, especially about tracing and controlling the electronic motion of atoms and molecules by attosecond pulses.