We show that the photoionization dynamics from the innermost shell of atoms changes significantly when instead of single atoms an ordered group of atoms or a crystal is considered. We find that the electronic current away from a given atom induced by pulsed photoionization is strongly suppressed in ordered groups of atoms although the overlap of the ground-state orbitals of neighboring atoms is negligible. The effect occurs even when the electron-electron interaction is disregarded in our model and thus impact ionization as well as the trapping due to the charging of the environment cannot be the cause of the suppression. Even when a reflectionless potential is used for the modeling of the atomic potential, the suppression is still profound. We interpret this localization of photoionized electrons as appearing due to quantum interference between the partial electron wave packets emitted from different atoms.

• Received 7 December 2014
• Revised 15 May 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.92.033424