High-harmonic generation from an epsilon-near-zero material

High-harmonic generation (HHG) is a signature optical phenomenon of strongly driven, nonlinear optical systems. Specifically, the understanding of the HHG process in rare gases has played a key role in the development of attosecond science¹. Recently, HHG has also been reported in solids, providing novel opportunities such as controlling strong-field and attosecond processes in dense optical media down to the nanoscale². Here, we report HHG from a low-loss, indium-doped cadmium oxide thin film by leveraging the epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) effect^3–8, whereby the real part of the material’s permittivity in certain spectral ranges vanishes, as well as the associated large resonant enhancement of the driving laser field. We find that ENZ-assisted harmonics exhibit a pronounced spectral redshift as well as linewidth broadening, resulting from the photo induced electron heating and the consequent time-dependent ENZ wavelength of the material. Our results provide a new platform to study strong-field and ultrafast electron dynamics in ENZ materials, reveal new degrees of freedom for spectral and temporal control of HHG, and open up the possibilities of compact solid-state attosecond light sources.