Generation of circular polarized high-order harmonics from single color quantum light

Abstract: The atomic response to an ultra-intense driving field produces a characteristic high-harmonic spectrum featuring a rapid drop in intensity for the lower harmonics, followed by a plateau and a sharp cutoff. This response vanishes for circularly polarized classical drivers -- a limitation that can be overcome by introducing quantum features into the driving field. In this work, we show that squeezed highly elliptically polarized drivers not only enable the high-harmonic generation (HHG) process in classically forbidden regimes of large ellipticity, but also yield highly elliptical harmonic radiation with pronounced super-Poissonian photon statistics. Moreover, we show that the HHG spectral features encode information about the quantum nature of the driving field, revealing the presence of its squeezed field fluctuations. By analyzing the HHG spectral intensity dependence as a function of the driver's ellipticity and squeezing orientation, we identify a means to probe the driving field's quantum properties that intrinsically lie in the high-photon number regime.