Abstract

Plasmon excitation in nanosystems allows for extreme light confinement beyond the diffraction limit, therefore enabling a number of new applications in photonics, energy harvesting and biology. In this context, it is key to obtain a realtime characterization of the onset from the plasmonic field and its ultrafast dephasing dynamics. Tunnel ionization with a perturbation for the time-domain observation of an electric field, short TIPTOE, is a recent established technique allowing for the optical sampling of ultrashort laser pulses based on strong field ionization. The main requirement of this technique is the use of a sufficiently short gate to induce ionization in a gas target. Subsequently, this ionization is modulated by a weaker pulse to be sampled. With this method it is possible to characterize arbitrary electric fields as long as ionization by the weak pulse itself does not occur [1,2]. Here, we implement TIPTOE for the optical sampling of linear plasmonic fields measured in the far-field regime.

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