Attosecond optoelectronic field measurement in solids
Shawn Sederberg, Dmitry A. Zimin, Sabine Keiber, Florian Siegrist, Michael S. Wismer, Vladislav S. Yakovlev, Isabella Floss, C. Lemell, Joachim Burgdörfer, Martin Schultze, Ferenc Krausz, Nicholas Karpowicz
Abstract
The sub-cycle interaction of light and matter is one of the key frontiers of inquiry made accessible by attosecond science. Here, we show that when light excites a pair of charge carriers inside of a solid, the transition probability is strongly localized to instants slightly after the extrema of the electric field. The extreme temporal localization is utilized in a simple electronic circuit to record the waveforms of infrared to ultraviolet light fields. This form of petahertz-bandwidth field metrology gives access to both the modulated transition probability and its temporal offset from the laser field, providing sub-fs temporal precision in reconstructing the sub-cycle electronic response of a solid state structure.