Electron microscopy and electron diffraction techniques rely on electron sources. Those sources require strong electric fields to extract electrons from metals, either by the photoelectric effect, driven by multiphoton absorption of strong laser fields, or in the static field emission regime. Terahertz (THz) radiation, commonly understood to be nonionizing due to its low photon energy, is here shown to produce electron field emission. We demonstrate that a carrier-envelope phase-stable single-cycle optical field at THz frequencies interacting with a metallic microantenna can generate and accelerate ultrashort and ultrabright electron bunches into free space, and we use these electrons to excite and ionize ambient nitrogen molecules near the antenna. The associated UV emission from the gas forms a novel THz wave detector, which, in contrast with conventional photon-counting or heat-sensitive devices, is ungated and sensitive to the peak electric field in a strongly nonlinear fashion. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America
作者
我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。
推荐
暂无数据