This summer, I had the pleasure of working under Jonah Adelman in Prof. Stephen Leone’s group at UC Berkeley. Our group specializes in attosecond transient absorption pump-probe spectroscopy via high-harmonic generation, and my lab specifically focuses on applying this technique towards solid-state materials. Over the course of two months, my main objective was familiarizing myself with the first principles governing this spectroscopic method, and to conduct an experiment of my own, namely cross-polarizing the VIS-NIR pump beam and XUV probe beam in our setup to quantify the potential differences in absorption in elemental Tellurium. You can see my end of summer presentation here. Look in the speaker notes for details! One thing to note was following my presentation, I conducted the alternating wave plate scan mentioned in the “Future Steps” slide. Unfortunately, we found no difference in the absorption or phonon generation between the co-polarized or cross-polarized pump-probe measurements. This likely indicates that the anisotropic characteristics of Tellurium are not manifested in the effects of core-level excitation.