Scattering of a standing surface wave on a temporal discontinuity of a waveguiding plasma medium

Summary form only given. The scattering of a standing surface wave on the boundary of a solid-state/gaseous plasma half-space due to instant growth of the plasma density in time is investigated. The mechanism of nonstationarity is rapid ionization of the waveguiding medium by a short laser pulse. We show that for a standing wave, in contrast to a traveling one, the scattering depends on the wave phase at the moment of ionization. By changing the moment of ionization, we can control the energy distribution between newly excited modes which include frequency upshifted standing surface wave, transient bulk radiation, and free streaming currents with a constant magnetic field in the semiconductor. The described phenomena open up new possibilities to probe the dynamics of surface excitations in semiconductors on the ultrashort time scale