Ion evaporation by single-cycle terahertz pulses

Picosecond duration terahertz pulses are suitable for many applications and, recently, their ability to trigger electron emission from nanometric samples has been demonstrated [1] , [2] . The development of similar approaches to drive ions emission is very prone to open new application areas notably for matter analysis and manipulation. Field emission of positive ions from a nanometric tip (called field evaporation) is the basic principle of the Atom Probe Tomography (APT), which is a 3D imaging technique based on controlled field evaporation of atoms from a nanometric needle shaped sample under a strong electric field [3] .