Femtosecond currents via the dynamic Stark effect
DOI: 10.1063/PT.3.2130
The Search and Discovery report titled “An electrical insulator turns metallic within a femtosecond” (Physics Today, February 2013, page 13
Significantly, and in a broader context, the groundbreaking experiment by Krausz and coworkers falls into a class of symmetry-breaking laser-control scenarios known to induce net currents in spatially symmetric systems through laser fields of low temporal symmetry. 1 The idea of using Stark effects as the main microscopic mechanism for the production of currents arose in an earlier theoretical proposal to use Stark effects to bridge the energy gap of a semiconducting material. 2 The experiments demonstrate how such ideas can be applied to induce currents in a material with an energy gap as large as 9 eV.
References
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More about the Authors
Paul Brumer. (pbrumer@chem.utoronto.ca) University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Ignacio Franco. (franco@chem.rochester.edu) University of Rochester, Rochester, New York .