Place: Great lecture hall / Großer Hörsaal des Physikalisches Institutes, Hermann-Herder-Str. 3
6:00 pm / 9:00 am
Frank Stienkemeier (Freiburg)
Introduction & Final review of the Year 2023
6:15 pm / 9:15 am
Giuseppe Sansone (Freiburg)
The Ultrafast Odyssey: How Scientists Generated the First Attosecond Pulsesto Probe Electrons in Motion
The announcement of the Nobel Prize in 2023 awarded 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” was a joyful event for the entire ultrafast research community. The award crowns the research conducted over more than 30 years by numerous groups on generating ever shorter pulses and applying them to the study of electronic dynamics.
In my talk, I will show how the work of the three Nobel laureates laid the foundation for research in the field of attosecond physics. In particular, I will review the groundbreaking experiments that first demonstrated the generation of high-order harmonics and then characterized attosecond pulses in the time domain.
I will discuss the influence of these results on the research of several colleagues within the ultrafast research communities (including my own!).
Finally, I will describe how attosecond metrology techniques developed at the turn of the century have recently led to the generation of attosecond light pulses at free-electron lasers and attosecond electron bunches.
Chair: Frank Stienkemeier
7:00 pm / 10:00 am
Klaus Mecke (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)
Numbers and Narratives: Why should physicists care about poems?
Physics and literature represent two diametrically opposed ways of viewing the world. In combination they could develop a productive potential. The talk provides an overview of possibles bridges between the two cultures by showing the importance of language and metaphors in physical research as well as of narrative modulations of scientific theories in literary texts.
