Abstract
With the advent of high-intensity femtosecond sources has come the ability to excite, on a subpicosecond time scale, the electrons in a solid to temperature Tc greatly in excess of the lattice vibrational temperature T1.1 In a previous experiment on Ag,2 it was shown that non-equilibrium heating of the electrons leads to subpicosecond thermionic emission, but that space–charge fields distort the initial thermal distribution. Here, we achieve quantitative understanding of the non-equilibrium thermionic emission process by simultaneously measuring the reflectivity of the incident light, the total electron yield, and electron-energy distribution curves (EDCs) of the emitted electrons. The results are modeled with an analytic Richardson–Dushman type equation and with particle simulation codes which include space–charge.
© 1992 Optical Society of America
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