Disappearing resonance tunneling in photoelectron emission

Key Laboratory for Photonic and Electronic Bandgap Materials, Ministry of Education, and School of Physics and Electronic Engineering, Harbin Normal University - Harbin 150025, China

Received: 10 October 2014
Accepted: 8 January 2015

Abstract

We predict a phenomenon of disappearing resonance tunneling, found in the course of investigating photoionization microscopy of multielectronic atoms in the presence of a uniform external electric field. Li atoms are taken to illustrate that for multielectronic atoms, noticeable tunneling is slowly attenuated with increasing the lifetime of Stark resonance states and it finally becomes invisible. In order to decipher disappearing resonance tunneling, we propose a competition mechanism between transmission and transfer of electron waves. In this mechanism, it is crucial to relate the contribution of resonance tunneling to photoelectron emission of multielectronic atoms with the lifetime of Stark resonance states corresponding to the transmission broadening. The analysis shows that such a phenomenon should exist in any system of multielectronic atoms or molecules. The present findings should serve as a basis for explanation of disagreement between observations and theoretical calculations in Xe atoms. We expect that disappearing resonance tunneling predicted in this letter should be visible in experiment of photoionization microscopy for any multielectronic atom or molecule.