In 2020, the project ATTIDA was initiated at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. A team of physicists was formed to carry out the proposed research in a new laboratory. We have successfully designed and constructed an experimental setup for attosecond STM, overcoming several technical and physical challenges. We have explored the physics underlying the interaction of an ultrashort laser pulse with a metallic sample. Aided by a novel measurement method for laser-driven currents based on fast light waveform modulation, we have achieved a proof-of-principle demonstration of attosecond STM [D. Davidovich et al., preprint arXiv:2507.10252 (2025)]. Here, we induce STM tunnelling currents using two-color laser pulses and dynamically control their direction, relying solely on the sub-cycle waveform of the pulses. We observe non-adiabatic tunnelling with an electron current burst duration of 860 as. Despite working under ambient conditions but free of thermal artifacts, we achieve sub-angström topographic sensitivity and a lateral spatial resolution of 2 nm. This unprecedented capability to control the direction of attosecond electron tunneling bursts will enable triggering and imaging ultrafast charge dynamics in atomic, molecular and condensed systems at the spatio-temporal microscopy frontier of lightwave electronics. Our study has been made possible by our newly developed theory models [B. Ma et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 133, 236901 (2024); A. Borisov et al., ACS Photonics 12, 2137 (2025); B. Ma et al., preprint arXiv:2503.14531 (2025)]. We also developed and built an experiment capable of delivering attosecond extreme-ultraviolet light pulses [Z. Chen et al., ACS Photonics 12, 2819 (2025)], which will open the door to molecular studies.
Furthermore, we have realized a source of ultrashort electron pulses for ultrafast low-energy electron microscopy inside a dedicated experimental setup placed in ultrahigh vacuum. A theory investigation shows that record-short electron pulses with a duration of a few thousand attoseconds are expected at the point of interaction with a nanomaterial sample, which promises excellent temporal resolution [M. Eldar et al., J. Phys. B 55, 074001 (2022)]. We also devised a new way to measure the temporal structure of femtosecond and attosecond electron pulses [Z. Chen et al., Science Advances 9, adg8516 (2023)]. Lastly, our research on low-energy electrons inspired a theory study of their resonant interactions with light, which revealed their unique physics and may open up applications in quantum simulations [M. Eldar et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 035001 (2024)].
