High-harmonic spectroscopy of the nonadiabatic coupling via Floquet-Bloch states

Strong laser light drives complex quantum electron dynamics in solids, which is captured by the high-harmonic generation (HHG) process. Here we report the observation of laser-dressed Floquet-Bloch states (FBSs) at the edge of the Brillouin zone (BZ) in HHG, by driving a large-bandgap MgO crystal in the strong-field regime where the laser pulse is intense enough both to accelerate electrons to the BZ edge as well as to dress the bands. We experimentally show and numerically confirm that the HHG spectrum encodes the nonadiabatic coupling between the conduction bands and FBSs, induced by the high-intensity driver, when some high harmonics are resonant with the dressed band structure. This enables us to trace the bandgap morphology - expanding HHG-spectroscopy techniques to cover the HHG tomography of the BZ edge.