arXiv · 1812.01673
Revisiting the Photon-Drag Effect in Metal Films
Abstract
The photon-drag effect, the rectified current in a medium induced by conservation of momentum of absorbed or redirected light, is a unique probe of the detailed mechanisms underlying radiation pressure. We revisit this effect in gold, a canonical Drude metal. We discover that the signal for p-polarized illumination in ambient air is affected in both sign and magnitude by adsorbed molecules, opening previous measurements for reinterpretation. Further, we show that the intrinsic sign of the photon-drag effect is contrary to the prevailing intuitive model of direct momentum transfer to free electrons.
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Jared H. Strait, Glenn Holland, Wenqi Zhu, Cheng Zhang, Bojan R. Ilic, Amit Agrawal, Domenico Pacifici, Henri J. Lezec. 2019-03-06. Revisiting the Photon-Drag Effect in Metal Films. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.123.053903
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