The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 was 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"[1]. In this talk I will give an overview of the strong-field atomic physics that led to this pioneering work and give some perspective on recent advances. This includes some of our own work involving strongly-driven attosecond electron motion in solids and its potential both for compact short-wavelength sources and for probing electronic structure and dynamics [2]. I will also describe efforts at atomic-scale imaging of light-driven electron motion using x-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs). Finally, I will briefly discuss recent advances in bright attosecond pulse generation in the soft and hard x-ray regime using XFELs [3,4].
[1] www.nobelprize.org
[2] for a review see (e.g.) Ghimire, S., Reis, D.A. High-harmonic generation from solids. Nature Phys 15, 10–16 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0315-5
[3] Huang, S. Ding, Y., Feng, Y., Hemsing, E., Huang, Z., Krzywinski, J., Lutman, A. A., Marinelli, A. , Maxwell, T. J. and Zhu, D. Generating single-spike hard x-ray pulses with nonlinear bunch compression in free-electron lasers. Phys. Rev. Lett., 119, 154801 (2017).https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.154801
[4] Duris, J., Li, S., Driver, T. et al. Tunable isolated attosecond X-ray pulses with gigawatt peak power from a free-electron laser. Nat. Photonics 14, 30–36 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-019-0549-5;
You are here
Attosecond Science, from Atomic Physics to Condensed Matter
David Reis, Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Monday, November 13, 2023 - 4:00pm
PAA A-102