Vanishing carrier-envelope-phase-sensitive response in optical-field photoemission from plasmonic nanoantennas

At the surfaces of nanostructures, enhanced electric fields can drive optical-field photoemission and thereby generate and control electrical currents at frequencies exceeding 100 THz (refs. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11). A hallmark of such optical-field photoemission is the sensitivity of the total emitted current to the carrier-envelope phase (CEP)1,2,3,7,11,12,13,14,15,16,17. Here, we examine CEP-sensitive photoemission from plasmonic gold nanoantennas excited with few-cycle optical pulses. At a critical pulse energy, which we call a vanishing point, we observe a pronounced dip in the magnitude of the CEP-sensitive photocurrent accompanied by a sudden shift of π radians in the photocurrent phase. Analysis shows that this vanishing behaviour arises due to competition between sub-optical-cycle electron emission events from neighbouring optical half-cycles and that both the dip and phase shift are highly sensitive to the precise shape of the driving optical waveform at the surface of the emitter. As the mechanisms underlying the dip and phase shift are a general consequence of nonlinear, field-driven photoemission, they may be used to probe sub-optical-cycle emission processes from solid-state emitters, atoms and molecules. Improved understanding of these CEP-sensitive photocurrent features will be critical to the development of optical-field-driven photocathodes for time-domain metrology and microscopy applications demanding attosecond temporal and nanometre spatial resolution

Optical-field-controlled photoemission from plasmonic nanoparticles

At high intensities, light–matter interactions are controlled by the electric field of the exciting light. For instance, when an intense laser pulse interacts with an atomic gas, individualcycles of the incident electric field ionize gas atoms and steer the resulting attosecond-duration electrical wavepackets. Such field-controlled light–matter interactions form the basisof attosecond science and have recently expanded from gases to solid-state nanostructures 3–18. Here, we extend these field-controlled interactions to metallic nanoparticles support-ing localized surface plasmon resonances. We demonstrate strong-field, carrier-envelope-phase-sensitive photoemission from arrays of tailored metallic nanoparticles, and we showthe influence of the nanoparticle geometry and the plasmon resonance on the phase-sensitive response. Additionally, from a technological standpoint, we push strong-field light–matterinteractions to the chip scale. We integrate our plasmonic nanoparticles and experimental geometry in compact, micro-optoelectronic devices that operate out of vacuum and underambient conditions