A quantum-field-theory description of photoemission by a laser-driven single-electron wave packet is presented. We show that, when the incident light is represented with multimode coherent states then, to all orders of perturbation theory, the relative phases of the electron's constituent momenta have no influence on the amount of scattered light. These results are extended using the Furry picture, where the (unidirectional) arbitrary incident light pulse is treated nonperturbatively with Volkov functions. This analysis increases the scope of our prior results in [Phys. Rev. A 84, 053831 (2011)], which demonstrate that the spatial size of the electron wave packet does not influence photoemission.

• Received 5 August 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.84.053832