Abstract

The frequency comb technique permits to control the carrier-envelope (CE) phase of few-cycle laser pulses. Before its invention, nonlinear photoemission from solids in the optical tunneling regime was proposed as an ideal sensor for the carrier-envelope phase [1]. Here emission only occurs when the potential barrier at the metal-vacuum interface is bent down (quasi-static regime). Therefore the emission process is sensitive to the laser electric field of a short laser pulse and thus its CE phase. A first study of photoemission from a planar gold cathode revealed a weak modulation of the photocurrent with CE phase [2].

© 2011 IEEE