Determination of the photoemission position in single-photon ionization with attosecond streaking spectroscopy

Abstract

Attosecond metrology can directly measure attosecond emission time of photoexcited electrons from matter, providing unprecedented understanding of transition processes of electrons from bound to continuum states. However, some fundamental details of the electron dynamics in the entire emission process upon photoexcitation still remain debatable or unknown. The photoemission time delays deduced from attosecond streaking spectroscopy originate from photoelectron propagation in the coupled Coulomb-laser fields, encoding the spatial and spectral information of electrons upon photoexcitation. Here we demonstrate that attosecond photoemission delays can be used to image picometer-resolved photoemission position via a classical model. The electronic dynamics in the laser-assisted single-photon ionization process is fully captured by a quantum path-integral model. We trace the imaged photoemission position to the average position of spatially coherent superposition of electron waves upon photoexcitation and, in particular, predict emission position coinciding with the orbital radius of the ground state of hydrogen-like atoms, in contrast with previous predictions.