Quantum tunnelling without a barrier
arXiv:2311.14826 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.111.043103
Abstract
Tunneling is an iconic concept that captures the peculiarity of quantum dynamics but, despite its ubiquity, questions remain. We focus on strong-field tunneling, which is vital to all attosecond science. We find an unexpected optical tunneling event that happens when the instantaneous electric field vanishes and there is no barrier. This event arises from a color switchover in a strongly polychromatic field. The tunneling without a barrier reveals the disconnect between the standard intuition built on the picture of a quasistatic barrier and the nonadiabatic nature of the process.
7 pages, 5 figures
References in corpus (13)
- Quantum Tunneling in Nuclear Fusion
- Locally and globally chiral fields for ultimate control of chiral light matter interaction
- Experimental evidence for Wigner's tunneling time
- A practical scheme for generating isolated elliptically polarized attosecond pulses using bi-chromatic counter rotating circularly polarized laser fields
- Ionization Time and Exit Momentum in Strong-Field Tunnel Ionization
- Coulomb-corrected quantum interference in above-threshold ionization: Working towards multi-trajectory electron holography
- Quantum mechanical approach to probing the birth of attosecond pulses using a two-color field
- Slalom in complex time: emergence of low-energy structures in tunnel ionization via complex time contours
- Suppression of individual peaks in two-colour high harmonic generation
- Asymmetric Tunneling of Bose-Einstein Condensates
- Momentum transfers in correlation-assisted tunnelling
- Sub-barrier recollisions and the three classes of tunneling time delays in strong-field ionization
- A unified theory of tunneling times promoted by Ramsey clocks