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There has been recently significant attention attracted by the development of attosecond science and technology that aim at pulse generation, physical system excitation, detection, spectroscopy, and electron motion control within the optical cycle, i.e. on the attosecond time scale. In nanoscience, which is another rapidly developing field, one of the important problems is the study and utilization of phenomena that are simultaneously localized on the nanoscale and ultrafast. The localization length of surface plasmon eigenmodes in nanoplasmonics is determined by the size of the constituent nanoparticles and can be on order of several nanometers. The relaxation rate of the surface plasmon polarization is across the plasmonic spectrum in the 10-100 fs range, allowing coherent control of nanoscale energy localization with femtosecond laser light. Importantly, collective motion in plasmonic nanosystems unfolds on much shorter, namely attosecond time scales defined by the inverse spectral bandwidth of the plasmonic resonant region. We propose and theoretically introduce a principally new approach that will allow one to directly measure the spatio-temporal dynamics of the nanolocalized optical fields with ~100 as temporal resolution and nanometer spatial resolution. Measurement of nanolocalized optical fields is interesting from both the fundamental positions and in view of the multiple existing and potential applications of nanoplasmonics. * Co-authors: Matthias F. Kling, Ulf Kleineberg, and Ferenc Krausz |
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