Electromagnetic dressing of the electron energy spectrum of Au(111) at high momenta

TL;DR

This study uses ultrafast photoemission momentum microscopy to investigate how electromagnetic fields modify the electron energy spectrum of Au(111) surfaces, revealing the dominance of laser-assisted photoelectric effects and the influence of dielectric screening.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental approach combining ultrafast photoemission microscopy with electromagnetic dressing to analyze high-momentum electron states on metal surfaces.

Findings

Dressed bands are mainly due to laser-assisted photoelectric effect, not Floquet-Bloch bands.

S-polarized light can dress free-electron states at high momenta.

Dielectric response significantly affects photoemission-based band structure identification.

Abstract

Light-engineering of quantum materials via electromagnetic dressing is considered an on-demand approach for tailoring electronic band dispersions and even inducing topological phase transitions. For probing such dressed bands, photoemission spectroscopy is an ideal tool, and we employ here a novel experiment based on ultrafast photoemission momentum microscopy. Using this setup, we measure the in-plane momentum-dependent intensity fingerprints of the electromagnetically-dressed sidebands from a Au(111) surface for s- and p-polarized infrared driving. We find that at metal surfaces, due to screening of the driving laser, the contribution from Floquet-Bloch bands is negligible, and the dressed bands are dominated by the laser-assisted photoelectric effect. Also, we find that in contrast to general expectations, s-polarized light can dress free-electron states at large photoelectron momenta. Our results show that the dielectric response of the material must carefully be taken into account when using photoemission for the identification of light-engineered electronic band structures.