News

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...

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...

The second now again public defense at our chair after some years - and also at this one everybody was not only enthusiastic about another outstanding lecture, but also about the wonderful atmosphere: Tobias Weitz defended his thesis with waving flags -- congratulations! For all who don't know him p...

SCHOOL ON THE FRONTIERS OF LIGHT: Photonics with free electrons -- this summer school will take place at ICFO close to Barcelona at the beginning of July. Apply  here by May 14.

Attosecond physics, also called strong field physics, is based on the fact that electrons are emitted from something on the attosecond time scale and are accelerated thereon in the intense optical field. Some of the electrons are even driven back and collide with the body emitting them. For about 30...

Another highly interesting ACHIP collaboration meeting is behind us - this time in Stanford and with the hottest results from there and from Erlangen. Was this really the last meeting? Unfortunately, after more than seven years of generous support, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation cannot contin...

For more than ten years, we and other research groups worldwide have been working on strong-field physics on solids - which until now could only ever be observed on nanometre-sharp needle tips. In terms of the driving optical wavelength, these tips are zero-dimensional objects. We wondered if we cou...