Attosecond pulse shaping around a Cooper minimum

High harmonic generation (HHG) is used to measure the spectral phase of the recombination dipole matrix element (RDM) in argon over a broad frequency range that includes the 3p Cooper minimum (CM). The measured RDM phase agrees well with predictions based on the scattering phases and amplitudes of the interfering s- and d-channel contributions to the complementary photoionization process. The reconstructed attosecond bursts that underlie the HHG process show that the derivative of the RDM spectral phase, the group delay, does not have a straight-forward interpretation as an emission time, in contrast to the usual attochirp group delay. Instead, the rapid RDM phase variation caused by the CM reshapes the attosecond bursts.