Tailoring the high-harmonic emission in two-level systems and semiconductors by pulse shaping

The generation of specific high harmonics for an optical two-level system is elucidated. The desired emitted radiation can be induced by a carefully designed excitation pulse, which is found by a multiparameter optimization procedure. The presented mechanism can also be applied to semiconductor structures for which the calculations result in much higher emission frequencies. The optimization procedure is either performed using a genetic algorithm or a rigorous mathematical optimization technique.