Ellipticity dependence of high-order harmonic generation in disordered semiconductors

Abstract We analyze the ellipticity dependence of high order harmonic generation (HHG) in disordered semiconductors. We show that a disordered crystal can radiated HHG spectra containing only odd harmonics of the laser frequency for all values of the ellipticity of the laser. Furthermore, we show that the HHG yield of our disordered models decreases monotonically with increasing laser ellipticity as observed in recent experiments. I particular, our numerical calculations, based on a coarse grained model, reproduce many of the qualitative features of the experimental HHG spectra of ZnO and GaAs.