Clocking and controlling attosecond currents in a scanning tunnelling microscope

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10252v2
• Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2025 11:34:24 GMT
• Title: Clocking and controlling attosecond currents in a scanning tunnelling microscope
• Authors: Daniel Davidovich, Boyang Ma, Adi Goldner, Shimon Cohen, Zhaopin Chen, Michael Krüger,
• Abstract summary: We control the direction of attosecond currents using two-colour laser pulses.<n>Non-adiabatic tunnelling is the underlying physical mechanism, yielding a current burst duration of 860 as.<n>This unprecedented capability to directionally control attosecond bursts will enable imaging ultrafast charge dynamics in atomic, molecular and condensed systems.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Quantum tunnelling of electrons can be confined to the sub-cycle time scale of strong light fields, contributing decisively to the extreme time resolution of attosecond science. Because tunnelling also enables atomic-scale spatial resolution in scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM), integrating STM with light pulses has long been a key objective in ultrafast microscopy, spanning the picosecond and femtosecond domains, with first signatures of attosecond dynamics. However, while sub-cycle dynamics on the attosecond time scale are routinely controlled and determined with high precision, controlling the direction of attosecond currents and determining their duration have remained elusive in STM. Here, we induce STM tunnelling currents using two-colour laser pulses and dynamically control their direction, relying solely on the sub-cycle waveform of the pulses. Projecting our measurement data onto numerical and analytical solutions of the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation reveals non-adiabatic tunnelling as the underlying physical mechanism, yielding a current burst duration of 860 as. Despite working under ambient conditions but free of thermal artifacts, we achieve sub-angstr\"om topographic sensitivity and a lateral spatial resolution of 2 nm. This unprecedented capability to directionally control attosecond bursts will enable triggering and imaging ultrafast charge dynamics in atomic, molecular and condensed systems at the spatio-temporal microscopy frontier of lightwave electronics.

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