Photon bunching in high-harmonic emission controlled by quantum light

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DOI	Resolve DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-025-01673-6
Author	Search for: Lemieux, Samuel¹ORCID identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1773-8795; Search for: Jalil, Sohail A.ORCID identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3149-6374; Search for: Purschke, David N.¹ORCID identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1303-4782; Search for: Boroumand, Neda ORCID identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5711-2340; Search for: Hammond, T. J.; Search for: Villeneuve, David¹ORCID identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2810-3648; Search for: Naumov, Andrei¹ORCID identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4593-2560; Search for: Brabec, Thomas ORCID identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0784-0614; Search for: Vampa, Giulio¹ORCID identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8492-3408
Affiliation	National Research Council of Canada. Quantum and Nanotechnologies
Funder	Search for: National Research Council of Canada. Quantum Sensing Program; Search for: Joint Center for Extreme Photonics; Search for: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
Format	Text, Article
Subject	quantum optical state; photon fields; photon bunching; quantum-optical states; high-harmonic emission; attosecond spectroscopies
Abstract	Attosecond spectroscopy comprises several techniques to probe matter using electrons and photons. One frontier of attosecond methods is to reveal complex phenomena arising from quantum-mechanical correlations in the matter system, in the photon fields and among them. Recent theories have laid the groundwork for understanding how quantum-optical properties affect high-field photonics, such as strong-field ionization and acceleration of electrons in quantum-optical fields, and how entanglement between the field modes arises during the interaction. Here we demonstrate a new experimental approach that transduces some properties of a quantum-optical state through a strong-field nonlinearity. We perturb high-harmonic emission from a semiconductor with a bright squeezed vacuum field, resulting in the emission of sidebands of the high harmonics with super-Poissonian statistics, indicating that the emitted photons are bunched. Our results suggest that perturbing strong-field dynamics with quantum-optical states is a viable way to coherently control the generation of these states at short wavelengths, such as extreme ultraviolet or soft X-rays. Quantum correlations will be instrumental to advance attosecond spectroscopy and imaging beyond the classical limits.
Publication date	2025-05-13
Publisher	Nature
Licence	Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
In	Nature Photonics (13 May 2025).
Language	English
In press	Yes
Peer reviewed	Yes
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Record identifier	6d75103d-7f61-4303-80eb-55251284c067
Record created	2025-05-23
Record modified	2025-05-23

Date modified:: 2025-06-20