Experimental Investigation of the Possibilities of the Optical Tunnelling of Electron from a Metal Surface Induced by Strong C0₂ Laser Pulses

Abstract

According to the fundamental laws of the intense field QED, the general processes governing the laser-induced electron emission from atoms or solids “traditionally” may be interpreted as two complementary limiting interaction processes of the same phenomenon. The first is the “multiphoton” type process, when the electron interacts only with several well determined small number of photons (quantum limit), the second is the “tunnelling” type, when the number of the interacting photons is increasingly high (classical limit). While practically all research activity was concentrated both theoretically and experimentally to the “multiphoton” questions, less attention was paid to the “tunnelling” case, in spite of the fact that the early beginning of the intense field QED started with the pronunciation of this latter.