  The so-called "polar catastrophe", a sudden electronic reconstruction taking
place to compensate for the interfacial ionic polar discontinuity, is currently
considered as a likely factor to explain the surprising conductivity of the
interface between the insulators LaAlO3 and SrTiO3. We applied optical second
harmonic generation, a technique that a priori can detect both mobile and
localized interfacial electrons, to investigating the electronic polar
reconstructions taking place at the interface. As the LaAlO3 film thickness is
increased, we identify two abrupt electronic rearrangements: the first takes
place at a thickness of 3 unit cells, in the insulating state; the second
occurs at a thickness of 4-6 unit cells, i.e., just above the threshold for
which the samples become conducting. Two possible physical scenarios behind
these observations are proposed. The first is based on an electronic transfer
into localized electronic states at the interface that acts as a precursor of
the conductivity onset. In the second scenario, the signal variations are
attributed to the strong ionic relaxations taking place in the LaAlO3 layer.
