Ultra-broadband water window supercontinuum generation with high efficiency in a three-color laser field

We propose an efficient method to generate an ultra-broadband supercontinuum by using a three-color field synthesized by a 1600 nm driving pulse and two weak (3200 nm and 400 nm) control pulses. The results show that the acceleration and ionization steps in the HHG process are simultaneously controlled in our scheme, which can not only broaden the bandwidth but also enhance the harmonic yields of the generated spectrum. Thus a high-efficiency supercontinuum with the photon energies ranging from 205 eV to 480 eV is observed. Based on our 3D propagation simulations, we show that the short quantum path of the supercontinuum is well phase-matched and can be selected under suitable propagation conditions. Thereby, the modulation due to quantum path interference is largely reduced and intense isolated sub-100 as pulses with tunable central wavelengths are directly obtained within water window spectral region.