Electron ping pong in the nano-world

Electron ping pong in the nano-world

An international team of researchers succeeded at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics to control and monitor strongly accelerated electrons from nano-spheres with extremely short and intense laser pulses.

When intense laser light interacts with electrons in nanoparticles that consist of many million individual atoms, these electrons can be released and strongly accelerated. Such an effect in nano-spheres of silica was recently observed by an international team of researchers in the Laboratory for Attosecond Physics (LAP) at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics. The researchers report how strong electrical fields (near-fields) build up in the vicinity of the nanoparticles and release electrons. Driven by the near-fields and collective interactions of the charges resulting from ionization by the laser light, the released electrons are accelerated, such that they can by far exceed the limits in acceleration that were observed so far for single atoms.