Driving-laser ellipticity dependence of high-order harmonic generation in graphene

High-order harmonic generation in graphene driven by the elliptically polarized midinfrared driving pulse is theoretically investigated by solving the two-band semiconductor Bloch equation in the Houston basis under the tight-binding approximation. It is found that the maximal harmonic yield occurs at a specific driver ellipticity whose value is determined by relaxation processes, so that the proper choice of the dephasing time is key to quantitatively reproducing the recent experiment. We show that the ellipticity dependence mainly originates from the interband harmonic emission, and exhibits an almost stable behavior against the crystal orientation. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that both the large magnitude and the circular vortex structure of the transition dipole near the graphene Dirac point are responsible for forming the unique characteristics. These results demonstrate that high-harmonic generation by the elliptically polarized driving field carries significant information on the dephasing time and the electronic structure signature in the graphene.