Estimation of the tip field enhancement on a field emitter under laser illumination

We report the experimental evidence of controlled field evaporation of atoms from the surface of a tip-like-shape specimen with subwavelength dimensions by means of subpicosecond laser pulses. It is shown that the evaporation is assisted by the intrinsic laser electric field without any significant thermal activation. The single-atom detection sensitivity of the field ion microscope is used to get an accurate measurement of the electric field enhancement factor at the tip apex as a function of the wave polarization. The absence of thermal diffusion of atoms at the tip surface prior to field evaporation, demonstrates the feasibility of a laser assisted three-dimensional atom probe.

[1]  M. Kozuma,et al.  Phase-coherent amplification of matter waves , 1999, Science.

[2]  T. Tsong,et al.  Methods for a precision measurement of ionic masses and appearance energies using the pulsed‐laser time‐of‐flight atom probe , 1984 .

[3]  T. Tsong,et al.  Pulsed‐laser time‐of‐flight atom‐probe field ion microscope , 1982 .

[4]  G. Kellogg,et al.  Pulsed-laser atom-probe field-ion microscopy , 1980 .

[5]  Theo Rasing,et al.  Local-field enhancement on rough surfaces of metals, semimetals, and semiconductors with the use of optical second-harmonic generation , 1984 .

[6]  Olivier J. F. Martin,et al.  Controlling and tuning strong optical field gradients at a local probe microscope tip apex , 1997 .

[7]  D. Blavette,et al.  An atom probe for three-dimensional tomography , 1993, Nature.

[8]  Andrea V. Bragas,et al.  Laser field enhancement at the scanning tunneling microscope junction measured by optical rectification , 1998 .

[9]  C. Grovenor,et al.  Pulsed laser atom probe analysis of semiconductor materials , 1986, Microscopy of Semiconducting Materials, 1987.

[10]  T. Tsong.  Measurement of the field evaporation rate of several transition metals , 1978 .

[11]  R. Bachelot,et al.  Apertureless near-field optical microscopy: A study of the local tip field enhancement using photosensitive azobenzene-containing films , 2003 .

[12]  Hendrik F. Hamann,et al.  Strength of the electric field in apertureless near-field optical microscopy , 2001 .

[13]  Lukas Novotny,et al.  Theory of Nanometric Optical Tweezers , 1997 .

[14]  P. Mélinon,et al.  Deposition of Au N clusters on Au(111) surfaces. I. Atomic-scale modeling , 2000 .