Dresden 2017 – scientific programme

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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik

O 36: ELI-ALPS: A New European Light Source for Ultrafast Surface Science

O 36.1: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 21, 2017, 14:00–14:30, TRE Phy

Attosecond control of excited electrons and nuclei in gas- and condensed-phase systems — •Thomas Pfeifer — MPI für Kernphysik, Heidelberg

The physics of (visible) matter is mainly determined by electrons bound to nuclei. Electrons also represent the atomic glue to connect atoms in molecules and clusters and finally form nanoparticles and solids. Dynamics occurs when electrons are, sometimes only for very short times, elevated to excited states, in which they are particularly responsive to small changes in their environment that can influence the product of a chemical reactions or result in a particular phase transition.

Here, we discuss the effect of intense laser fields on the excited states of atoms, molecules, and condensed-phase systems. A universal change of the quantum-mechanical phase evolution (not to be confused with a phase transition) is observed and can be extracted from a broad coherent spectrum of a pulse with a lifetime much shorter than the (atto-, femto-, ..., nanosecond) lifetime of the excited state.

This phenomenon gives rise to a multitude of scientific opportunities, ranging from laser control of few- to many-electron systems, x-ray-frequency combs and (nuclear) precision spectroscopy to observing and understanding the emergence of fundamental quantum processes by time-resolving their spectrum, exemplarily shown here for the buildup of a Fano resonance.