Experimental study demonstrates ultrafast ion field evaporation in lanthanum hexaboride nanotips, indicating atomic responses faster than acoustic phonon vibrations.
We present an experimental and numerical study of ion field evaporation from LaB 6 nanotips using single-cycle terahertz (THz) transients and a static bias voltage. Varying the amplitude and phase of the THz pulses and the value of the bias, we explore the THz-induced reshaping of the ions energy and their time-of-flight spectra. These results prove that short THz transient of about 1 ps can induce ionization and emission of ions from LaB 6 samples by a field effect: the THz transient acts as an ultra-short electrical pulse. Moreover, comparing numerical and experimental results, we prove that the response time of surface atoms to the THz transient is shorter than 1 ps, corresponding to the vibration times of acoustic phonons in LaB 6 .
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Karam et al. (2023) studied this question.