Field emission microscopy pattern of a single-crystal diamond needle under ultrafast laser illumination

Abstract

We report herein on the spatial beam properties of a field emission electron source based on a single-crystal diamond needle illuminated by ultrashort light pulses. We show that the increasing of the laser intensity strongly modifies the emission pattern, leading to the emergence of a new emission region at high peak power. This region is situated on the opposite side of the diamond needle to the one irradiated by the laser. By spatially-resolved energy spectrometry, we prove that the electrons emitted from this region are governed by a multi-photon absorption process. The occurrence of this emission pattern can be explained by accounting for the inhomogeneous distribution of the optical field enhancement and the laser absorption induced by light diffraction within the nanometric needle. The numerical simulations performed on a real sub-wavelength tip confirm this localization of the optical field enhancement and reveal that the electrons trajectories match the spatial beam distribution evidenced experimentally. This work underlines the need to closely monitor the surface roughness of the field emitter as well as the laser illumination conditions to finely control its emission pattern.