News

Which are the next walls to fall? The aim of the Falling Walls Foundation is to remove the great hurdles of our time, such as the ubiquitous scepticism about founding a start-up - especially in Germany. Within the framework of the workshop "Young Entrepreneurs in Science", doctoral students were int...

Our recent paper on the demonstration of the longitudinal Kapitza-Dirac effect was featured with a commentary in the News & Views section of Nature Physics. In their insightful summary, Benoit Chalopin and Arnaud Arbouet describe our work on inelastic ponderomotive scattering of electrons at an ...

Recently, extremely fast phenomena in nature have become directly accessible due to the development of attosecond science. Imaging atoms and electrons in motion requires a probe that allows high spatial resolution on time-scales shorter than one oscillation of the light field. Imaging with light in ...

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 ...