All optical method for measuring the carrier envelope phase from half-cycle cutoffs

An all optical method is demonstrated for measuring the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of few-cycle laser pulses. It is found that, in the few-cycle regime, the high harmonic spectrum generated from asymmetric molecules shows several half-cycle cutoffs that change their positions as the CEP varies. Such half-cycle cutoffs represent the fingerprint of different quantum trajectories and the waveform of the driving pulse. In this case, the CEP can be accurately measured from the half-cycle cutoffs.