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Updated: Dec 3, 2025

All-electronic Nanosecond-resolved Scanning Tunneling Microscopy: Facilitating the Investigation of Single Dopant Charge Dynamics
Published on: January 19, 2018
Coulomb-induced ionization time lag after electrons tunnel out of a barrier
Abstract:
After electrons tunnel out of a laser-Coulomb-formed barrier, the movement of the tunneling electron can be affected by the Coulomb potential. We show that this Coulomb effect induces a large time difference (longer than a hundred attoseconds) between the tunneling-out time at which the electron exits the barrier and the ionization time at which the electron is free. This large time difference has important influences on strong-field processes such as above-threshold ionization and high-harmonic generation, with remarkably changing time-frequency properties of electron trajectories. Some semi-quantitative evaluations on these influences are addressed, which provide new insight into strong-field processes and give suggestions on attosecond measurements.
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