Attosecond pulses at ICFO

On October 26, national newspaper El Pais highlighted the Attoscience and Ultrafast Optics lab at ICFO as one of the few places worldwide which have generated and measured attosecond pulses. Such an attosecond resolution camera is fast enough to track movements of electrons inside atoms and molecules. Potential applications are to improve our understanding and control of chemical reaction pathways, to unravel the inner workings of protein folding, and to offer new techniques to dynamic biological imaging.

The group led by ICREA Prof. Jens Biegert works in a highly interdisciplinary field which fuses ultrafast laser physics, extreme nonlinear optics, atomic and molecular physics, XUV synchrotron optics, UHV technology, and electron-ion coincidence imaging techniques.