Excitation and control of quantum well nanostructures by unipolar half-cycle attosecond pulses

Unipolar and quasi-unipolar half-cycle pulses having nonzero electric pulse area are a limit of pulse shortening in a given spectral range. In spite of the fact that existence of such pulses was considered by Jackson (1962), V.L. Ginzburg (1960-s), Bullough and Ahmad (1971) as well as Bessonov (1981), the possibility of their existence and propagation in space remained questionable for many years. Only within the past decades both the possibility of unipolar pulse existence and their propagation dynamics were shown and analyzed in detail theoretically and experimentally. So far such pulses became a subject of active research due to their potential in the ultra-fast optics and study of new regimes of light-matter interactions with subcycle resolution. Here, we show the possibility of the effective ultrafast control of the level populations in quantum well nanostructures by the half-cycle unipolar attosecond light pulses in comparison to the single-cycle ones. It is shown that the population dynamics can be determined by the electric pulse area divided to its characteristic "scale" determined by the quantum well width. The selective excitation of quantum states and the feasibility of the population inversion by the subcycle unipolar pulses is demonstrated.