High-order harmonic generation with bicircular fields—the combination of counter-rotating circularly polarized pulses at different frequencies—results in a series of short-wavelength XUV harmonics with alternating circular polarizations, and experiments show that there is an asymmetry in the emission between the two helicities: a slight one in helium and a larger one in neon and argon, where the emission is carried out by $p$-shell electrons.

Here we analyze this asymmetry by switching to a rotating frame in which the field is linearly polarized; this induces an effective magnetic field which lowers the ionization potential of the $p_+$ orbital that corotates with the lower-frequency driver, enhancing its harmonic emission and the overall helicity of the generated harmonics, while also introducing nontrivial effects from the transformation to a noninertial frame in complex time. In addition, this analysis directly relates the small asymmetry produced by s-shell emission to the imaginary part of the recollision velocity in the standard strong-field-approximation formalism.