Photon momentum transfer and partitioning: from one to many

Xiaodan Mao; Hongcheng Ni; Kang Lin; Pei-Lun He; Hao Liang; Sebastian Eckart; Feng He; Kiyoshi Ueda; Reinhard Dörner; Jian Wu

doi:10.1038/s41467-025-60983-z

Photon momentum transfer and partitioning: from one to many

Nat Commun. 2025 Jul 1;16(1):5977. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-60983-z.

Authors

Xiaodan Mao¹, Hongcheng Ni^{2

3}, Kang Lin^{4

5}, Pei-Lun He^{6

7

8}, Hao Liang⁹, Sebastian Eckart¹⁰, Feng He^{7

8}, Kiyoshi Ueda^{1

11}, Reinhard Dörner¹⁰, Jian Wu^{12

13

14}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Precision Spectroscopy, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Precision Spectroscopy, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China. hcni@lps.ecnu.edu.cn.
³ Collaborative Innovation Center of Extreme Optics, Shanxi University, Taiyuan, Shanxi, China. hcni@lps.ecnu.edu.cn.
⁴ School of Physics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. klin@zju.edu.cn.
⁵ Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Micro-nano Quantum Chips and Quantum Control, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. klin@zju.edu.cn.
⁶ Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Heidelberg, Germany.
⁷ Key Laboratory for Laser Plasmas (Ministry of Education), School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
⁸ Collaborative Innovation Center for IFSA (CICIFSA), Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
⁹ Max-Planck-Institut für Physik komplexer Systeme, Dresden, Germany.
¹⁰ Institut für Kernphysik, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
¹¹ Department of Chemistry, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.
¹² State Key Laboratory of Precision Spectroscopy, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China. jwu@phy.ecnu.edu.cn.
¹³ Collaborative Innovation Center of Extreme Optics, Shanxi University, Taiyuan, Shanxi, China. jwu@phy.ecnu.edu.cn.
¹⁴ Chongqing Key Laboratory of Precision Optics, Chongqing Institute of East China Normal University, Chongqing, China. jwu@phy.ecnu.edu.cn.

Abstract

The transfer of photon momentum is indispensable in initiating and directing light-matter interactions, which underpins a plethora of fundamental physical processes from laser cooling to laser particle acceleration. The transferred photon momentum is distributed between the photoelectron and the residual ion upon ionization. Our study presents a general and consistent framework for photon momentum transfer covering an arbitrary number of absorbed photons. Our results bridge the gap between the previously considered limiting cases of single-photon and multi-photon strong-field ionization and suggest revising the current consensus for the multi-photon limit by demonstrating that with each additional photon absorbed above the ionization threshold, the photoelectron acquires on average twice the momentum of the absorbed photon. Our work paves the pathway towards a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental processes of photon momentum transfer in light-matter interactions, with implications for both theoretical physics and practical applications that harness the transfer of photon momentum.

Abstract

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