Antiresonance-Like Behavior in Carrier-Envelope-Phase-Sensitive Optical-Field Photoemission from Plasmonic Nanoantennas

Abstract

Given the quasi-static nature of optical-field emission and the nontrivial dependence of the emission rate on the instantaneous electric field strength, the CEP-sensitive component of the emitted photocurrent is highly sensitive to the energy of the optical pulse, and should carry information about the underlying sub-cycle dynamics of electron emission. Here we examine CEP-sensitive photoemission from plasmonic gold nanoantennas excited with few-cycle optical pulses of increasing energy. We observe antiresonance-like features in the CEP-sensitive photocurrent; specifically, at a critical pulse energy, we observe a sharp dip in the magnitude of the CEP-sensitive photocurrent accompanied by a sudden shift of π-radians in the phase of the photocurrent. Using a quasi-static tunneling emission model, we find that these antiresonance-like features arise due to competition between electron emission from neighboring optical half-cycles, and that they are highly sensitive to the precise shape of the driving optical waveform at the surface of the emitter. As the underlying mechanisms that produce the antiresonance-like features are a general consequence of nonlinear, field-driven photoemission, the antiresonance-like features could be used to probe sub-optical-cycle, sub-femtosecond emission processes, not only from solid-state emitters, but also from gas-phase atoms and molecules. Beyond applications in the study of ultrafast, field-driven electron physics, an understanding of these antiresonance-like features will be critical to the development of novel photocathodes for future time-domain metrology and microscopy applications that demand both attosecond temporal and nanometer spatial resolution.

References in corpus (4)

• Attosecond control of electrons emitted from a nanoscale metal tip
• Strong-field above-threshold photoemission from sharp metal tips
• Carrier-envelope phase effects on the strong-field photoemission of electrons from metallic nanostructures
• Tracing the phase of focused broadband laser pulses

Cited by in corpus (13)

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• Impact of DC bias on Weak Optical-Field-Driven Electron Emission in Nano-Vacuum-Gap Detectors
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• Nanoantenna Design for Enhanced Carrier-Envelope-Phase Sensitivity
• Attosecond physics in optical near fields
• Ultrafast Charge Separation Induced by a Uniform Field in Graphene Nanoribbons
• PHz Electronic Device Design and Simulation for Waveguide-Integrated Carrier-Envelope Phase Detection
• Carrier-envelope phase control of ultrafast photocurrents in layered MoS${}_2$
• Ultrafast optically induced tunneling in narrow metallic gaps from the time dependent density functional perspective