Abstract
Atoms exposed to intense light lose one or more electrons and become ions. In strong fields, the process is predicted to occur via tunnelling through the binding potential that is suppressed by the light field near the peaks of its oscillations. Here we report the real-time observation of this most elementary step in strong-field interactions: light-induced electron tunnelling. The process is found to deplete atomic bound states in sharp steps lasting several hundred attoseconds. This suggests a new technique, attosecond tunnelling, for probing short-lived, transient states of atoms or molecules with high temporal resolution. The utility of attosecond tunnelling is demonstrated by capturing multi-electron excitation (shake-up) and relaxation (cascaded Auger decay) processes with subfemtosecond resolution.
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Acknowledgements
We thank A. F. Starace for discussions. We are grateful for financial support from the Volkswagenstiftung (Germany), the Marie Curie Research Training Network XTRA, Laserlab Europe, and a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship. F.K. acknowledges support from the FWF (Austria). The research of M.F.K. and M.J.J.V. is part of the research programme of the Stichting voor Fundamenteel Onderzoek der Materie, which is financially supported by the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek. This research was supported by the cluster of excellence Munich Centre for Advanced Photonics (http://www.munich-photonics.de).
Author Contributions M.U., Th.U., M.S. and A.J.V. contributed equally to this work.
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This file contains Supplementary Discussion, Supplementary Figures 1-11 with Legends, Supplementary Table 1 and additional references. The Supplementary Information concerns Setup, Data analysis and Simulations (PDF 930 kb)
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Uiberacker, M., Uphues, T., Schultze, M. et al. Attosecond real-time observation of electron tunnelling in atoms. Nature 446, 627–632 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05648
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05648
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