Application of highly nondegenerate cascaded four-wave mixing to high-order harmonic generation

Abstract

We propose to use nondegenerate cascaded four-wave mixing processes for efficient high order harmonic generation in plasmas and dielectrics. A simple model is used to estimate the temporal duration and maximum order of the generated harmonics for both a typical laser-produced plasma and glass slide. In the plasma case, we expect considerable pulse compression, with the production of sub-femtosecond pulses starting from the 8th harmonic.