News

Particle accelerators are indispensable for research, medicine and industry. We have developed a miniature particle accelerator that accelerates and guides electrons through nanostructures using laser light. In an interview in Welt der Physik (German), Prof. Dr. Hommelhoff and Stefanie Kraus repo...

Needle tips are known to be the electron source with the highest beam quality. However, due to their small size, the emitted current is limited. Combining the emission of multiple tips should allow for high currents while still providing appreciable beam quality. We have fabricated and measured an a...

How do the electron number statistics behave when classical light and non-classical light are used to trigger non-linear photoemission from nanometer-sized metal tips? We discuss this question in our recently published manuscript in Nature Physics, which can be read here. For more details see als...

The ACHIP research program, generously supported by the Californian Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation with around 20 million euros, has come to an end. ACHIP stands for "Accelerator on a Chip International Program". It has funded research into this type of laser-based accelerator and allowed us to m...

Our Master's student Julian Freier has been awarded the contribution prize of the German Physical Society's Radiation and Medical Physics Association at this year's DPG Spring Meeting in Berlin. He received the award for his poster titled "Cell Irradiation Experiments and Film Dosimetry with Low Ene...

UCLA Professor Sergio Carbajo has won one of the highly competitive Humboldt Research Fellowships. This will allow him to visit us for up to a year to conduct research with us. Congratulations! We are looking forward to the visit!

Almost two dissertations in one and both parts accompanied by great journal articles, plus an outstanding defense - the two letters in front of the name are more than deserved. Congratulations, Dr. Meier!

This year's Röntgen Prize of the University of Giessen went to our former postdoc and current professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Dr. Roy Shiloh. He received the 15,000 euro prize for his outstanding contributions to the realization of a photonic particle accelerator. As it was mentione...

This year we again retreated for two and a half days to be able to discuss our projects intensively on the basis of presentations - and to listen to four more excellent presentations by invited guests. This year's guests were Dr. Thilo Egenolf from Darmstadt, Prof. Christoph Lemell from Vienna, Prof...

Optical near-fields excited by ultra-short laser pulses in a silicon-based nanophotonic structure can accelerate free electrons. This is known as dielectric laser acceleration (DLA). This new method allows much higher acceleration gradients to be achieved in a smaller space compared to conventional ...

Dr. Tobias Weitz has just received the "Jury Prize for Fundamental Research in an Important Future Field of the Modern Information Society" for his dissertation "Lightwave electronics in graphene" at the Applied Photonics Awards 2023 in Jena - congratulations!