Attosecond science allows the extremely fast movements of electron particles to be observed. This emerging field brings both opportunity and controversy.

UCL's Research Opportunity Scholarship (UCL-ROS) supports Black, Asian and ethnic minority postgraduate research degree students at the start of their academic career.

What is attosecond science, and how is it used? Optica Fellow Jens Biegert, ICFO, Spain, explains how the field unravels how things work inside materials usi...

ICFO researchers have set a new record by generating the shortest soft X-ray pulse to date –just 19.2 attoseconds long. This is the fastest flash of light, faster than the atomic unit of time (24.2 attoseconds), which is the time it takes the electron to orbit once around the hydrogen atom – the “atomic year”. This enables it to capture how matter behaves and interacts at atomic and subatomic scales with unprecedented temporal resolution.

The Laserlab-Europe Talk “Attosecond interferometry" by Nirit Dudovich (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) was held on 26 June 2024. High harmonic generation (HHG) spectroscopy has been successfully applied over the past two decades to resolve fundamental strong-field phenomena in atoms, molecules and solids. An important aspect of HHG spectroscopy lies in its coherent nature. The strong-field interaction directly transfers the coherence of the laser field into the coherent properties of the electronic wavefunction that interacts with the field, and back into the optical properties of the emitted harmonics. Resolving the internal coherence is key to reconstructing the internal dynamics, being one of the primary challenges in HHG spectroscopy. As in many other branches of physics, the presence of coherence is determined through interferometry. In this talk, I will describe advanced schemes for attosecond interferometry. The application of these schemes provides direct insights into a range of fundamental phenomena in nature – from field induced tunneling [1] in atomic systems to subcycle dynamics in condense matter systems [2-4]. #science #attoscience #attosecond #interferometry #hhg #highharmonicgeneration #spectroscopy #laser References [1] O. Kneller et al., Nature Photonics 16, 304 (2022). [2] A. J. Uzan-Narovlansky et al., Nature (2024). [3] A. J. Uzan-Narovlansky et al., Nature Photonics 16, 428 (2022). [4] A. J. Uzan et al., Nature Photonics 14, 183 (2020). -- The Laserlab-Europe Talks consist of a series of online seminars and panel discussions proposed and organised by our community on specific topics (thematic or research-specific) and provide a platform for regular information exchange and knowledge sharing. The talks take place on a Wednesday afternoon each month and are open to all interested parties, from PhD students to experts in the field and industrial and medical partners as appropriate. For more information: https://www.laserlab-europe.eu/events/talks -- Links to further YouTube channels: Weizmann Institute of Science: @WeizmannInstitute