Extreme nonlinear strong-field photoemission from carbon nanotubes

Chi Li; Ke Chen; Mengxue Guan; Xiaowei Wang; Xu Zhou; Feng Zhai; Jiayu Dai; Zhenjun Li; Zhipei Sun; Sheng Meng; Kaihui Liu; Qing Dai

doi:10.1038/s41467-019-12797-z

Extreme nonlinear strong-field photoemission from carbon nanotubes

Nat Commun. 2019 Oct 25;10(1):4891. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-12797-z.

Authors

Chi Li^{1

2}, Ke Chen^{1

2}, Mengxue Guan³, Xiaowei Wang⁴, Xu Zhou⁵, Feng Zhai⁶, Jiayu Dai⁴, Zhenjun Li^{1

2}, Zhipei Sun^{7

8}, Sheng Meng⁹, Kaihui Liu¹⁰, Qing Dai^{11

12}

Affiliations

¹ Division of Nanophotonics, CAS Key Laboratory of Standardization and Measurement for Nanotechnology, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Beijing, 100190, China.
² Center of Materials Science and Optoelectronics Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China.
³ Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics and Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, 100190, China.
⁴ Department of Physics, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China.
⁵ School of Physics, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Collaborative Innovation Center of Quantum Matter, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China.
⁶ Department of Physics, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, 321004, China.
⁷ Department of Electronics and Nanoengineering, Aalto University, Tietotie 3, FI-02150, Finland.
⁸ QTF Centre of Excellence, Department of Applied Physics, Aalto University, FI-00076, Aalto, Finland.
⁹ Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics and Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, 100190, China. smeng@iphy.ac.cn.
¹⁰ School of Physics, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Collaborative Innovation Center of Quantum Matter, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China. khliu@pku.edu.cn.
¹¹ Division of Nanophotonics, CAS Key Laboratory of Standardization and Measurement for Nanotechnology, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Beijing, 100190, China. daiq@nanoctr.cn.
¹² Center of Materials Science and Optoelectronics Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China. daiq@nanoctr.cn.

Abstract

Strong-field photoemission produces attosecond (10^-18 s) electron pulses that are synchronized to the waveform of the incident light. This nonlinear photoemission lies at the heart of current attosecond technologies. Here we report a new nonlinear photoemission behaviour-the nonlinearity in strong-field regime sharply increases (approaching 40th power-law scaling), making use of sub-nanometric carbon nanotubes and 800 nm pulses. As a result, the carrier-envelope phase sensitive photoemission current shows a greatly improved modulation depth of up to 100% (with a total modulation current up to 2 nA). The calculations reveal that the behaviour is an interplay of valence band optical-field emission with charge interaction, and the nonlinear dynamics can be tunable by changing the bandgap of carbon nanotubes. The extreme nonlinear photoemission offers a new means of producing extreme temporal-spatial resolved electron pulses, and provides a new design philosophy for attosecond electronics and photonics.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't