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Europhysics news

Attosecond science: a new era for many-body physics

Jens Biegert

Published Jan 1, 2024• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

The properties and the functionality of materials and devices, or chemical reactions, are determined by the microscopic interaction of their building blocks, i.e., between electrons, holes, and nuclei. Thus, understanding the many-body interaction between these fundamental building blocks holds the key to advancing fundamental science and, at the same time, directly leads to applications. Attosecond science now provides an entirely new view into the quantum many-body interaction of these microscopic building blocks.

DOI
10.1051/epn/2024105

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The properties and the functionality of materials and devices, or chemical reactions, are determined by the microscopic interaction of their building blocks, i.e., between electrons, holes, and nuclei. Thus, understanding the many-body interaction between these fundamental building blocks holds the key to advancing fundamental science and, at the same time, directly leads to applications. Attosecond science now provides an entirely new view into the quantum many-body interaction of these microscopic building blocks.
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The past thirty years witnessed rapid developing of strong field physics that leads to the first generation of attosecond (10−18 s) pulses. The duration of available pulses has recently been reduced to less than 100 as, approaching the Kepler period of a classical electron revolving around the nucleus. For the first time, electron motions inside atoms, molecules and solids can be traced, probed and even steered in real time. It pushed the study on ultrafast dynamic processes into a new frontier, giving birth to attosecond physics. The development of attosecond pulses provides unprecedented coherent ultrashort XUV (extreme ultra-violet) of soft X-ray sources that enable imaging the atomic structure and resolving the related quantum dynamics for matter science. In particular, it allows the probing and monitoring of electron dynamics in the natural time scale of attoseconds with atomic spatial resolution. The generation and applications of attosecond pulses are directly related to the control and manipulation of the sub-cycle electron dynamics. Recent studies on the correlated multielectron dynamics have provided insight into the optical and dynamical properties of matter in the perspectives of time, phase and entanglement. It deepens our understanding on some of the fundamental questions, e.g., how the single or multiple photons are absorbed and how short are the quantum processes such as photoionization, tunneling ionization and charge migration. Although currently attosecond pulses are limited by the flux and pulse duration, the combination of attosecond pulses with intense infrared laser pulses paves new ways of controlling and probing electron dynamics in the domains of energy, time and space that lays the foundation for petahertz optoelectronics and attosecond pulse based transient spectroscopy. In this review, we will first briefly summarize the advancement of strong field and ultrafast physics including the relevant experimental findings, the theoretical explorations, the related technologies and the possible applications. Then we focus on the sub-cycle electron or multielectron dynamics and their manifestation on the ionization and coherent radiation properties. We start with the time behavior of Fano resonance and how it can be probed in time domain. In section 2, the correlated electron dynamics is discussed in term of anti-screening effect and Pauli effect that influence strong field ionization and high harmonic generation processes. In section 3, the coherent emission with frequency from terahertz to soft XUV and their joint measurement are discussed by emphasizing the generation mechanism of terahertz wave in two-color laser pulses. The developed high-harmonic and terahertz wave spectroscopy (HATS) is shown capable of imaging the molecular structure and dynamics. In section 4, the time-resolving of electron and hole dynamics and their coherence is proposed based on attosecond transient absorption technique. The coherence of ionization and the correlated electron dynamics is hinted crucial for electron-hole interaction. The topics are very limited and mainly selected from the perspectives of our group.
The realization of ultracold polar molecules in laboratories has pushed physics and chemistry to new realms. In particular, these polar molecules offer scientists unprecedented opportunities to explore chemical reactions in the ultracold regime where quantum effects become profound. However, a key question about how two-body losses depend on quantum correlations in interacting many-body systems remains open so far. Here, we present a number of universal relations that directly connect two-body losses to other physical observables, including the momentum distribution and density correlation functions. These relations, which are valid for arbitrary microscopic parameters, such as the particle number, the temperature, and the interaction strength, unfold the critical role of contacts, a fundamental quantity of dilute quantum systems, in determining the reaction rate of quantum reactive molecules in a many-body environment. Our work opens the door to an unexplored area intertwining quantum chemistry; atomic, molecular, and optical physics; and condensed matter physics.