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    Femtosecond Field‐Driven On‐Chip Unidirectional Electronic Currents in Nonadiabatic Tunneling Regime
    (Weinheim : Wiley VCH, 2021) Shi, Liping; Babushkin, Ihar; Husakou, Anton; Melchert, Oliver; Frank, Bettina; Yi, Juemin; Wetzel, Gustav; Demircan, Ayhan; Lienau, Christoph; Giessen, Harald; Ivanov, Misha; Morgner, Uwe; Kovacev, Milutin
    Recently, asymmetric plasmonic nanojunctions have shown promise as on-chip electronic devices to convert femtosecond optical pulses to current bursts, with a bandwidth of multi-terahertz scale, although yet at low temperatures and pressures. Such nanoscale devices are of great interest for novel ultrafast electronics and opto-electronic applications. Here, the device is operated in air and at room temperature, revealing the mechanisms of photoemission from plasmonic nanojunctions, and the fundamental limitations on the speed of optical-to-electronic conversion. Inter-cycle interference of coherent electronic wavepackets results in a complex energy electron distribution and birth of multiphoton effects. This energy structure, as well as reshaping of the wavepackets during their propagation from one tip to the other, determine the ultrafast dynamics of the current. It is shown that, up to some level of approximation, the electron flight time is well-determined by the mean ponderomotive velocity in the driving field.
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    Symmetry breaking and strong persistent plasma currents via resonant destabilization of atoms
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2017) Brée, Carsten; Hofmann, Michael; Babushkin, Ihar; Demircan, Ayhan; Morgner, Uwe; Kosareva, Olga G.; Savelev, Andrei B.; Husakou, Anton; Ivanov, Misha
    The ionization rate of an atom in a strong optical field can be resonantly enhanced by the presence of long-living atomic levels (so called Freeman resonances). This process is most prominent in the multiphoton ionization regime meaning that ionization event takes many optical cycles. Nevertheless, here we show that these resonances can lead to fast subcycle-scale plasma buildup at the resonant values of the intensity in the pump pulse. The fast buildup can break the cycletocycle symmetry of the ionization process, resulting in generation of persistent macroscopic plasma currents which remain after the end of the pulse. This, in turn, gives rise to a broadband radiation of unusual spectral structure forming a comb from terahertz (THz) to visible. This radiation contains fingerprints of the attosecond electronic dynamics in Rydberg states during ionization.