News

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!

A main research focus at our chair is the investigation of light-matter interaction on metals on ultrafast time scales. For this purpose, we focus ultrashort laser pulses on metallic needle tips and investigate the emitted electrons. Important parameters of these tips are the work function, as well ...

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics goes 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”. Congratulations to the three, who of course absolutely deserve this award! It is and remai...

To gain a deeper understanding of the physical processes, a close match between theory models and experimental evidence is necessary. In much of our work, we use very strong and very short femtosecond laser pulses to drive the emission and dynamics of electrons at nanometre-sharp metal tips. For tun...

Many processes in our everyday life follow their statistics according to a Poisson distribution. In fact, typical laser sources also behave in this way. For pulsed lasers, this graphically means that the number of photons in a laser pulse fluctuates around a certain mean value (with the root of the ...

Have you ever wondered how optical nearfields really look like inside of  narrow, sub-wavelength-wide optical nanostructures?  Do they look as expected, or do minor  structure deviations lead to a quite different picture? Here is a method that allows imaging of some special kind of nearfields with t...

There has been research and development on novel electron sources for many decades, for example on sharp metal tips as a source in electron microscopes. These tips are usually electrochemically fabricated and have a minimum tip radius of about 10 nm. For photoemission experiments that exploit the ex...

A large area of ultrafast physics is all about the motion of electrons in strong pulsed laser fields on the time scale of femtoseconds (1 fs = 1 millionth of a billionth of a second). If femtosecond laser pulses are now sent to extremely sharp metal tips, extremely short electron pulses are produced...

The second now again public defense at our chair after some years - and also at this one everybody was not only enthusiastic about another outstanding lecture, but also about the wonderful atmosphere: Tobias Weitz defended his thesis with waving flags -- congratulations! For all who don't know him p...