Extreme nonlinear strong-field photoemission from carbon nanotubes

Strong-field photoemission produces attosecond (10⁻¹⁸ s) electron pulses that are synchronized to the waveform of the incident light. This nonlinear photoemission lies at the heart of current attosecond technologies. Here we report a new nonlinear photoemission behaviour—the nonlinearity in strong-field regime sharply increases (approaching 40th power-law scaling), making use of sub-nanometric carbon nanotubes and 800 nm pulses. As a result, the carrier-envelope phase sensitive photoemission current shows a greatly improved modulation depth of up to 100% (with a total modulation current up to 2 nA). The calculations reveal that the behaviour is an interplay of valence band optical-field emission with charge interaction, and the nonlinear dynamics can be tunable by changing the bandgap of carbon nanotubes. The extreme nonlinear photoemission offers a new means of producing extreme temporal-spatial resolved electron pulses, and provides a new design philosophy for attosecond electronics and photonics.