Optical-Field-Driven Electron Tunneling in a Metal-Insulator-Metal Nano-junction

Optical-field driven electron tunneling in nanojunctions has made demonstrable progress toward the development of ultrafast charge transport devices at subfemtosecond time scales, and have evidenced great potential as a springboard technology for the next generation of on-chip "lightwave electronics." Here, the empirical findings on photocurrent the high nonlinearity in metal-insulator-metal (MIM) nanojunctions driven by ultrafast optical pulses in the strong optical-field regime are reported. In the present MIM device, a 14th power-law scaling is identified, never achieved before in any known solid-state device. This work lays important technological foundations for the development of a new generation of ultracompact and ultrafast electronics devices that operate with suboptical-cycle response times.