Chair for Laser Physics
Welcome to the website of the Chair for Laser Physics!
At the moment we work in three main branches of research that combine the topics of laser physics, quantum, electron, and nano optics, strong-field and attosecond physics, plasmonics and solid state research. We investigate the wave and particle properties of electrons in ultrafast processes in and at nano objects; we develop new particle traps to create quantum optical systems in order to build a quantum electron microscope; we use laser pulses at photonic nanostructures to look into novel concepts for particle acceleration.
The main part of our laboratory is centered around light-matter interaction on fastest time scales, namely the femtosecond and attosecond time scale (1 fs = 1 millionth of a billionth of a second, 1 as = 1 billionth of a billionth of a second). This allows us, to put it a bit more abstractly, to work towards understanding und utilizing photon-electron coupling in various systems. A part of this is based on highly advanced methods to control electrons, often with light fields, which requires building new laser sources and amplifiers.
This year's Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier - "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”. Congratulations to the three, who of course absolutely deserve this award! It is and remai...
It is always helpful but often not at all easy to summarize the current state of a large field of research. It is even more difficult to predict where the journey may yet lead. Last year, the prestigious Wolf Prize was awarded to three pioneers of attosecond physics, and the three gave an interview ...
To gain a deeper understanding of the physical processes, a close match between theory models and experimental evidence is necessary. In much of our work, we use very strong and very short femtosecond laser pulses to drive the emission and dynamics of electrons at nanometre-sharp metal tips. For tun...
Many processes in our everyday life follow their statistics according to a Poisson distribution. In fact, typical laser sources also behave in this way. For pulsed lasers, this graphically means that the number of photons in a laser pulse fluctuates around a certain mean value (with the root of the ...
Have you ever wondered how optical nearfields really look like inside of narrow, sub-wavelength-wide optical nanostructures? Do they look as expected, or do minor structure deviations lead to a quite different picture? Here is a method that allows imaging of some special kind of nearfields with t...
There has been research and development on novel electron sources for many decades, for example on sharp metal tips as a source in electron microscopes. These tips are usually electrochemically fabricated and have a minimum tip radius of about 10 nm. For photoemission experiments that exploit the ex...
A large area of ultrafast physics is all about the motion of electrons in strong pulsed laser fields on the time scale of femtoseconds (1 fs = 1 millionth of a billionth of a second). If femtosecond laser pulses are now sent to extremely sharp metal tips, extremely short electron pulses are produced...
