Unidirectional currents in asymmetric nanojunctions and electronic wavepacket interference

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In recent few years, ultrafast electron emission from gold dimer nanoantennas (nanojunctions) with gap sizes down to few nanometers has attracted great interest for on-chip electronics, promising petahertz signal processing bandwidth [2] , [3] . When embedding such a nanojunction into a closed circuit, unidirectional currents bursts which vary on the sub-cycle scale, may arise [2] - [5] . Such currents can be created in symmetric structures driven by few- cycle pulses affected by carrier envelope phase (CEP) control [2] , [3] , or alternatively, in asymmetric nanostructures [4] , [5] (see Fig. 1a,b ). In the last case, CEP control is not needed.