News

The quantum coherent interaction of light with swift electrons represents the foundation of the fast-moving field of laser-based electron beam control including one of our major research projects of dielectric laser acceleration. In this work, we introduce the concept of intra-cycle interference, wh...

Congratulations to Dr. Tafel on the excellent defence of his dissertation! The well-deserved refreshment after the successful examination he was able to take off his doctoral cap right away.

Graphene, the 2-dimensional semi-metallic material with negligible screening effects at optical frequencies, can withstand high laser intensities and is therefore ideally suited to extend strong-field physics to a new material class – to 2D materials and to conductors. We recently found that after t...

Congratulations to DR. Timo Paschen, who defended his doctoral thesis with great success - and that in Corona times without an audience. But all four participants allowed in the room never got bored.  The doctor's hat was even specially equipped with anti-corona spacers.

Exactly 60 years ago, Theodore Maiman was the first person to generate flashes of laser light. How far we have come in laser-based research since then was compiled by Stewart Wills in a very nice article for the May issue of the free magazine "Optics and Photonics News". Our ACHIP project is feature...

What a nice surprise when we found out rather by chance that Nature Photonics chose the illustration for our article as cover picture. (For the article itself you can find a message further down here).

An ERC Advanced Grant, which comes with third-party funding of up to 2.5 million euros, has just been awarded to Professor Hommelhoff -- a great success, not only because of the large amount of money raised, which will be available for research at the chair over five years, but also because this fun...

This is a great success for Prof. Martin Hundhausen, senior academic councillor in our institute: He has just been elected to the Erlangen city council. Congratulations -- and good luck for the city politics with lots of physical expertise!

Prof. Dr. Lothar Ley, who held this chair until not too many years ago, has been named an "outstanding referee" by the American Physical Society APS - a distinction that highlights his particularly great and helpful commitment in the review process of the journals published by APS. Amongst these are...

Congratulations to DR. Christian Heide on defending his thesis --  with distinction!

Controlling electrons with optical fields of few-cycle laser pulses opens an avenue to coherently manipulate electron trajectories inside of materials. This control gives access to rich physics such as quantum path interference and topological effects . Recently we could experimentally demonstrate ...

How do optical near-fields between two ultrasharp metal needles of femtosecond laser pulses couple at the nanometer level? This question is addressed in our manuscript just published in PRB. Together with our colleagues from the Chair of Solid State Physics, we developed a scanning tunneling microsc...