Professor
Ferenc Krausz is recognized as one of the world?s leading scientists
in the field of attosecond physics. In 2002 (when he was still
professor at the University of Technology, Vienna) he succeeded - in
collaborative work with Prof. Theodor H䮳ch (Director at Max Planck
Institute of Quantum Optics) using the Nobel Prize winning Frequency
Comb-Technique - in developing "phase-stabilized" lasers for
generating femtosecond pulses (a femtosecond is a millionth of a
billionth of a second). This type of laser generates pulses that are
identical from pulse to pulse not only in intensity and frequency
but also in the position of the maxima and minima of the light
oscillations. The perfectly controlled high-intensity fields of
theses femtosecond pulses exert forces on electrically charged
elementary particles (electrons or protons) that are comparable to
intra-atomic forces.
This is the precondition for advancing
into the attosecond domain (an attosecond is a billionth of a
billionth of a second). When perfectly controlled femtosecond pulses
hit gas atoms in a so-called "target", their strong electric field
first knocks an electron from the atom and then immediately hurls it
back. The recaptured electron emits the absorbed energy as a short
light flash in the XUV (extremely short-wave ultraviolet) region.
The flash emitted by a single atom is immeasurable weak.
However, millions of atoms are targeted by the femtosecond pulses
and subsequently emit attosecond flashes perfectly synchronized with
millisecond timing. This generates a strongly collimated laser-type
beam of light pulses with a duration of 250 attoseconds. The SCIENCE
journal celebrated the first production of attosecond radiation as
one of the 10 most important achievements in science in 2002.
In 2003 Professor Krausz was appointed Director at Max
Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ), where he is head of the
"Attosecond and High-Field Physics" division. In 2004 he was also
made head of the Department of Experimental Physics at Ludwig
Maximilian?s University of Munich (LMU). The main interest of his
MPQ-LMU-team is the control and real-time observation of the motion
of electrons in atoms, molecules and solids using attosecond
measuring technique.
Professor Krausz and his team are also
pursuing the goal of developing new tools (e.g. high-energy electron
and X-ray beams) for investigating microscopic processes with high
resolution in both space and time. Such tools would constitute a
space-time microscope that makes the motion of electrons visible
with subatomic resolution in slow motion. The new radiation sources
could also afford new prospects in structural biology and in the
diagnosis and therapy of cancer.
Source:
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
