Light beams carrying a point singularity with a screw-type phase distribution are associated with an optical vortex. The corresponding momentum flow leads to an orbital angular momentum of the photons 1-3 . The study of optical vortices has led to applications such as particle micro-manipulation 4,5 , imaging 6 , interferometry 7 , quantum information 8 and highresolution microscopy and lithography 9 . Recent analyses showed that transitions forbidden by selection rules seem to be allowed when using optical vortex beams 10 . To exploit these intriguing new applications, it is often necessary to shorten the wavelength by nonlinear frequency conversion. However, during the conversion the optical vortices tend to break up 11-13 . Here we show that optical vortices can be generated in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) region using high-harmonic generation 14,15 . The singularity impressed on the fundamental beam survives the highly nonlinear process. Vortices in the XUV region have the same phase distribution as the driving field, which is in contradiction to previous findings 16 , where multiplication of the momentum by the harmonic order is expected. This approach opens the way for several applications based on vortex beams in the XUV region.Places where physical quantities become infinite or change abruptly are called singularities. The presence of phase dislocations (singularities) in the wavefront of a light beam determines both the phase and intensity structure around them. As the phase becomes indeterminate at singularities, both the real and the imaginary parts of the field amplitude (that is, also the field intensity) vanish. The characteristic helical phase profiles of optical vortices are described by exp(imθ) multipliers, where θ is the azimuthal coordinate and the integer number m is their topological charge, also called dislocation strength or winding number.Recalling the fact that in free space the Poynting vector gives the momentum flow, for helical phase fronts the Poynting vector has an azimuthal component that produces an orbital angular momentum parallel to the axis of the beam. The momentum circulates around the beam axis, so such beams are said to contain an optical vortex. As has been shown 1-3 , an m-fold charged optical vortex beam carries an orbital angular momentum of mh per photon independent of the spin angular momentum (that is, the polarization state). It was shown that transitions that are forbidden by known selection rules in the electric and magnetic dipole approximation seem to be allowed when using optical vortex beams 10 . This provides a new degree of freedom in the spectroscopy of forbidden transitions. Multi-coloured optical vortices can be generated through a nonlinear frequency-conversion process such as second-harmonic generation 16 or four-wave mixing, which is an important process in the white-light vortex generation. However, as predicted in ref. 11 and observed in ref. 12, vortex breakup in self-focusing nonlinear media is an important issue for supercontinuum vortex genera...

We demonstrate a dramatic change in the interaction forces between dark solitons in nonlocal nonlinear media. We present what we believe is the first experimental evidence of attraction of dark solitons. Our results indicate that attraction should be observable in other nonlocal systems, such as Bose-Einstein condensates with repulsive long-range interparticle interaction.

Abstract. We use correlated electron-ion momentum measurement to investigate laser induced non-sequential double ionization of Ar and Ne. Light intensities are chosen in a regime at and below the threshold where, within the rescattering model, electron impact ionization of the singly charged ion core is expected to become energetically forbidden. Yet, we find Ar ++ ion momentum distributions and an electron-electron momentum correlation indicative of direct impact ionization. Within the quasistatic model this may be understood by assuming that the electric field of the light wave reduces the ionization potential of the singly charged ion core at the instant of scattering. The width of the projection of the ion momentum distribution onto an axis perpendicular to the light beam polarization vector is found to scale with the square root of the peak electric field strength in the light pulse. A scaling like this is not expected from the phase space available after electron impact ionization. It may indicate that the electric field at the instant of scattering is usually different from zero and determines the transverse momentum distribution. A comparison of our experimental results with several theoretical results is given.

Measurements of energy-resolved angular distributions of electrons generated in above-threshold ionization of rare gases in a field with elliptical polarization are presented, with emphasis on the high-energy part of the spectra. The data show a second plateau at a specific angle with respect to the large component of the laser field. The results are compared to a calculation based on a strong-field rescattering approximation. This is interpreted in terms of the superposition of quantum trajectories. The second plateau is associated with the interference of electrons that do and that do not rescatter.