Excitation with effective subcycle laser pulses

We have used laser pulses with a temporally shaped polarization to demonstrate the multiphoton excitation of the xenon 5g state within a subcycle of a laser pulse. Our polarization gated laser pulses are composed of circularly polarized sections at the leading and trailing edges of the pulse and of an experimentally defined linearly polarized central part. Only the linear part (the gate) of the pulse can excite neutral xenon in the 5g state. The transition cannot be driven with circularly polarized light because the number of photons needed would cause a violation of selection rules for the change of the magnetic quantum number. We show that the linearly polarized central part can be reduced to a subcycle pulse. This allows us to study excitation with an effective pulse as short as 2.3 fs at 800 nm. Electron imaging spectroscopy has been used to visualize the presence of excited states as a function of the pulse duration of the gate.