Attosecond Magnetic Pulses from Ring-Current Gating Schemes

The conventional generation of strong magnetic fields in conducting or superconducting materials arranged in coils or solenoids is effective for studying long-term magnetic responses. However, these approaches cannot produce ultrashort magnetic fields to explore attosecond magnetization dynamics[1], [2]. In recent years, femtosecond laser pulses have been employed to induce ring currents[3] associated with strong magnetic fields [4]–[7]. Still, high-resolution control over the temporal and spectral content of the magnetic field would be desirable and no work to date managed to get to the attosecond domain, required for probing predicted attomagnetism[1].