Year: 2017

Just in time for the release of the next Star Wars film, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Marco Dettweiler) has examined lightsabers in its issue of Dec. 12, 2017. Whether and in what form they could be realized in the future has been commented on by Professor Hommelhoff ...

On Friday this week the Bavarian Secretary of the Interior Joachim Herrmann will come to our chair to augurate the new charging stations for electric cars together with us. A more detailed article will follow after the inauguration ceremony starting at 11 am. The program consists of: Welcoming: ...

Our former bachelor students Paul Beck and Timo Eckstein, as well as our former master student Philip Dienstbier, were awarded with the Ohm prize at this year's graduation ceremony. This award is dedicated to the "support of young researchers in the field of physics at the university of Erlangen-Nur...

Christian Heide has received the outstanding poster award at Synthetic Carbon Allotropes in Erlangen, which took place from september 24th to 27th. The poster describes his new data on coherent electron dynamics in graphene, controlled by the field of light. Congratlations! The Symposium web site...

Similar to surfers using the energy stored in sea waves to drive their motion towards the coast, elementary particles can surf a wave formed by tailored light fields. In a paper just published in Nature Physics, we have shown that the kinetic energy of electrons can be modulated on very short timescales by the interaction with an optical travelling wave.

“How fast can one turn on a current?” is a fundamentally important question behind boosting up the speed of modern electronics, since the data and signals are transferred via the flow of electrons. In joint work with the group of Prof. Heiko B. Weber of FAU's Applied Physics Chair, we have opened up a new channel for achieving ultrafast turning-on of currents in graphene, an exotic conducting material, on the timescale of a single femtosecond (1 femtosecond is a billionth of a millionth of a second).

Dr. Takuya Higuchi has received the best poster award at the Gordon Research Conference on Quantum Control of Light & Matter. The poster describes quantum mechanical interference effects of electrons in graphene, controlled by the fast oscillating field of ultrashort laser pulses. Congratulation...

We could theoretically and experimentally demonstrate an inelastic interaction between free electrons and an optical evanescent wave excited by total internal reflection at the planar interface between high-refractive index materials (silicon, germanium) and vacuum. This effect is interesting for bo...

One should think that the optical phase evolution of a common pulsed focused laser beam is known for a long time already -- that's not the case! Our lab in collaboration with colleagues around Prof. Gerhard Paulus's group in Jena has, for the first time, measured the phase in the focal area of such ...

The University of Erlangen promotes action against climate change by application of modern infrastructure based on renewable energies and zero emission mobility. At the chair of Laser Physics a roof top photovoltaics system was installed six years ago, making that location ideal to install charging ...

Manuscript on optical gating and streaking of electrons at sub-optical-cycle time scales published in Nature Communications Optical near-fields have recently been employed for both electron acceleration in so-called dielectric laser accelerators (DLAs) and in energy-resolved electron microscopy ima...

New year starts with a new logo for the department of laser physics After a long and hard knock-out competition, our chair has finally got a logo. The winner of the logo competition is Dr. Takuya Higuchi -- congratulations and many thanks!