Ultrafast Preparation and Detection of Ring Currents in Single Atoms
Abstract
Quantum particles can penetrate potential barriers by tunneling (1). If that barrier is rotating, the tunneling process is modified (2,3). This is typical for electrons in atoms, molecules or solids exposed to strong circularly polarized laser pulses (4,5). Here we measure how the transmission probability through a rotating tunnel depends on the sign of the magnetic quantum number m of the electron and thus on the initial sense of rotation of its quantum phase. We further show that the electron keeps part of that rotary motion on its way through the tunnel by measuring m-dependent modification of the electron emission pattern. These findings are relevant for attosecond metrology as well as for interpretation of strong field electron emission from atoms and molecules (6-13) and directly demonstrates the creation of ring currents in bound states of ions with attosecond precision. In solids, this could open a way to inducing and controlling ring-current related topological phenomena (14).
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1802.06630,
title = {Ultrafast Preparation and Detection of Ring Currents in Single Atoms},
author = {Sebastian Eckart and Maksim Kunitski and Martin Richter and Alexander Hartung and Jonas Rist and Florian Trinter and Kilian Fehre and Nikolai Schlott and Kevin Henrichs and Lothar Ph. H. Schmidt and Till Jahnke and Markus Schöffler and Kunlong Liu and Ingo Barth and Jivesh Kaushal and Felipe Morales and Misha Ivanov and Olga Smirnova and Reinhard Dörner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.06630},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
19 pages, 6 figures, Nature Physics accepted