News

On the 18th of October, our chair used the golden October weather to explore the numerous caves and hills on the southern edge of Franconian Switzerland around Neukirchen near Sulzbach-Rosenberg. The highlight of our hike was a guided tour through the 16 meter deep Easter Cave. The dripstone cave im...

How fast can electrons be controlled in a conductive material? This is a fundamental question that could boost up the speed of modern electronics. It determines how fast data and signals and thus information can be transmitted. In our article, which recently appeared in Physical Review Letters, we g...

Our chair and FAU Erlangen are founding members of the Max Planck Graduate School of Photonics. Apply here and until December 15th, if you are interested in a master's degree or doctoral training at one of the world's leading working groups in the broad field of photonics.

Under the leadership of our theory partners at TU Darmstadt (working group of Prof. Dr. Boine-Frankenheim), a contribution to Phys. Rev. Lett. has just been published. We show theoretically that electrons can be accelerated with the help of nanophotonic structures and laser pulses without losing a l...

Tungsten nano-tips are currently the most coherent electron sources. This property makes them ideal for use in electron microscopes or other electron-based measurement methods. For the operation, a voltage is applied to the tip, which enables the electrons to tunnel out of the metal (so-called field...

Professor Hommelhoff was elected to the DPG Parliament, in the course of the DPG Board of Directors election in 2018. The DPG, the German Physical Society, is the largest physical society in the world with over 60,000 members. Its presidents included Albert Einstein, Fritz Haber, Hermann von Helmhol...

After successfully defending his thesis "Ultrashort pulsed fiber lasers at 2-µm wavelength for dielectric laser acceleration of electrons and optical parametric amplification", Heinar Hoogland may now call himself Dr. Hoogland -- congratulations!

We describe an electron microscope whose electron emitter is operated with femtosecond laser pulses and a whole series of experiments with this device around electron acceleration using photonic structures in a publication that has just appeared in the Journal of Applied Physics. Apparently the arti...

For three years, we have been part of DFG priority programme "Quantum Dynamics in Tailored Intense Fields" (QUTIF) with a joint project together with the groups of Prof. Dr. Thomas Fennel (U Rostock) and Prof. Dr. Matthias Kling (LMU Munich) -- now our joint application for renewal has been positive...

This year's theme of the International Symposium of Advanced Photonics was Attosecond Science. Three of our group members had been generously invited to participate in the symposium taking place biannually close to Hamamatsu, Japan, at the beautiful Hamana lake. Please find more details here.

In yet another enjoyable and fruitful collaborative work with our Stanford partners, we could demonstrate purely optical control of electrons with the help of nanofabricated photonic structures. We demonstrate that we can accelerate electrons in not just one but two subsequent interaction regions, i...