Controlling the Photoelectric Effect in the Time Domain

Abstract

When an atom or molecule absorbs a high-energy photon, an electron is emitted with a well-defined energy and a highly-symmetric angular distribution, ruled by energy quantization and parity conservation. These rules seemingly break down when small quantum systems are exposed to short and intense light pulses, which raise the question of their universality for the simplest case of the photoelectric effect. Here we investigate the photoionization of helium by a sequence of attosecond pulses in the presence of a weak infrared dressing field. We continuously control the energy and introduce an asymmetry in the emission direction of the photoelectrons, thus contradicting well established quantum-mechanical predictions. This control is possible due to an extreme temporal confinement of the light-matter interaction. Our work extends time-domain coherent control schemes to one of the fastest processes in nature, the photoelectric effect.

arXiv comment18 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Probing single-photon ionization on the attosecond time scale
• Attosecond double-slit experiment
• Photoionization in the time and frequency domain
• Attosecond delays in molecular photoionization
• Streaking temporal double slit interference by an orthogonal two-color laser field
• Compact 200 kHz HHG source driven by a few-cycle OPCPA
• Intra- and intercycle interference of electron emission in laser assisted XUV atomic ionization