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 and Jian Wu ()
Additional contact information
Xiaodan Mao: East China Normal University
Hongcheng Ni: East China Normal University
Kang Lin: Zhejiang University
Pei-Lun He: Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik
Hao Liang: Max-Planck-Institut für Physik komplexer Systeme
Sebastian Eckart: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
Feng He: Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Kiyoshi Ueda: East China Normal University
Reinhard Dörner: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
Jian Wu: East China Normal University

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-60983-z Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:16:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-025-60983-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-60983-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().