Optical‐Field‐Driven Electron Tunneling in Metal–Insulator–Metal Nanojunction
Shenghan Zhou, Xiangdong Guo, Ke Chen, Matthew T. Cole, Xiaowei Wang, Zhenjun Li, Jiayu Dai, Chi Li, Qing Dai
Abstract
Optical-field driven electron tunneling in nanojunctions has made demonstrable progress toward the development of ultrafast charge transport devices at subfemtosecond time scales, and have evidenced great potential as a springboard technology for the next generation of on-chip "lightwave electronics." Here, the empirical findings on photocurrent the high nonlinearity in metal-insulator-metal (MIM) nanojunctions driven by ultrafast optical pulses in the strong optical-field regime are reported. In the present MIM device, a 14th power-law scaling is identified, never achieved before in any known solid-state device. This work lays important technological foundations for the development of a new generation of ultracompact and ultrafast electronics devices that operate with suboptical-cycle response times.