title: Third-harmonic generation in disguise of second-harmonic generation revisited: role of thin-film thickness and carrier-envelope phase.
abstract: It has previously been reported that a peak at the spectral position of the second harmonic of an excitation laser can be generated in an inversion-symmetric medium in the regime of extreme nonlinear optics and that this peak may be exploited to measure the carrier-envelope phase of the excitation pulse. Here we revisit this phenomenon with regard to reverse engineering the carrier-envelope phase and demonstrate that the thin-film thickness and the incident field can have a drastic influence on pulse propagation, and so the reverse engineering would likely fail.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Van Vlack
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hughes