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    All-optical Stückelberg spectroscopy of strongly driven Rydberg states
    (College Park, MD : APS, 2022) Bengs, Ulrich; Patchkovskii, Serguei; Ivanov, Misha; Zhavoronkov, Nickolai
    The AC Stark shift of electronic levels is ubiquitous in the interaction of intense light fields with atoms and molecules. As the light intensity changes on the rising and falling edges of a femtosecond laser pulse, it shifts the Rydberg states in and out of multiphoton resonances with the ground state. The two resonant pathways for transient excitation arising at the leading and the trailing edges of the pulse generate Young's type interference, generally referred to as the Stückelberg oscillations. Here we report the observation of the Stückelberg oscillations in the intensity of the coherent free-induction decay following resonant multiphoton excitation. Moreover, combining the experimental results with accurate numerical simulations and a simple model, we use the Stückelberg oscillations to recover the population dynamics of strongly driven Rydberg states inside the laser pulse by all-optical measurements after the end of the pulse. We demonstrate the potential of this spectroscopy to characterize lifetimes of Rydberg states dressed by laser fields with strengths far exceeding the Coulomb field between the Rydberg electron and the core.
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    Coherent control of the photoinduced transition in a strongly correlated material
    (College Park, MD : APS, 2022) Molinero, Eduardo B.; Silva, Rui E. F.
    The use of intense tailored light fields is the perfect tool to achieve ultrafast control of electronic properties in quantum materials. Among them, Mott insulators are materials in which strong electron-electron interactions drive the material into an insulating phase. When shining a Mott insulator with a strong laser pulse, the electric field may induce the creation of doublon-hole pairs, triggering a photoinduced transition into a metallic state. In this paper, we take advantage of the threshold character of this photoinduced transition and we propose a setup that consists of a midinfrared laser pulse and a train of short pulses separated by a half period of the midinfrared with alternating phases. By varying the time delay between the two pulses and the internal carrier envelope phase of the short pulses, we achieve control of the phase transition, which leaves its fingerprint at its high harmonic spectrum.