Modeling of surface electron emission with plasma interaction and space charge waves*

Electron emission from surfaces is of fundamental importance to both basic plasma physics and the development of advanced plasma sources and systems. Accurate modeling of electron emission processes is essential to the understanding of plasma breakdown and discharge, plasma-surface interaction, and initiation of plasma instabilities. Electron emission physics is also important to electron sources and beams, particle accelerators, pulsed power systems, vacuum electronics, and advanced radiation sources. This talk presents recent advances in our generalized quantum mechanical modeling of electron emission from surfaces under various combination of background field (DC or RF bias) and optical field (different laser wavelength, laser intensity, pulse duration, carrier-envelope phase (CEP), multi-color mixture, etc), by exactly solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation [1-8]. The effects of laser heating, dielectric surface coating, and resonant tunneling will be addressed. Also highlighted is the dynamics of plasma formation with strong surface electron emission due to photoemission or secondary electron emission [9], as well as dispersion of space charge waves on the surface emitted beams [10].