News

11th July 2022

Photographing a light helix

With their newly developed “nanoTIPTOE” technique, physicists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, in cooperation with Stanford University, have managed for the first time to record a helical light field on shortest time and length scales. It has been known since the end of the 19th […]

1st June 2022

Light-controlled reactions at the nanoscale

Controlling strong electromagnetic fields on nanoparticles is the key to triggering targeted molecular reactions on their surfaces. Such control over strong fields is achieved via laser light. Although laser-induced formation and breaking of molecular bonds on nanoparticle surfaces have been observed in the past, nanoscopic optical control of surface reactions has not yet been achieved. […]

25th February 2022

Sensing light

Future electronics will be fast. It could be driven at the frequencies of light waves. This implies that the switching speeds would be roughly 100,000 times faster than today. The development of electronics driven by light requires a detailed characterization of the light waves’s electromagnetic fields. Modern so-called field-sampling methods allow for probing the temporal […]

10th February 2022

Exploration of new frequency frontiers

If physicists want to learn more about the dynamics of electrons in solids, they probe them with electromagnetic fields. A particularly powerful method is transient field-resolved spectroscopy. When a laser pulse excites electrons in a solid, its transmission or reflectivity changes. Transient field-resolved spectroscopy permits to monitor these changes after the excitation in the waveform […]

23rd June 2021

Trihydrogen formation by intense irradiation

The Ultrafast Imaging and Nanophotonics team, led by Prof. Matthias Kling, in collaboration with the American University Sharjah, reports a new route to the formation of trihydrogen ions (H3+). The route involves a bimolecular reaction between water molecules adsorbed on nanoparticle surfaces, a situation that closely mimics irradiated ice and ice/dust particles in outer space. […]

14th June 2021

Poster award for Najd Altwaijry

At this year’s Max Planck School of Photonics Spring School Conference, Najd Altwaijry won a poster award. Her poster, titled: “Small, cheap method to sample electric fields up to 1PHz” included a 5-min video and explained the technique of “Nonlinear Photoconductive Sampling”. Using this technique, the team managed to sample an extremely short pulse (2,8fs) […]

26th April 2021

Switching insulators to conductors at high rate

Scientists at the Wigner Research Centre for Physics of ELKH have reached an important milestone on the pathway toward ultrafast optoelectronic devices. Members of the Ultrafast Nanooptics Research group led by Péter Dombi, within an international collaboration involving attoworld-researchers around the Field-resolved Nano-spectroscopy group of Matthias Kling, made different insulating media conductive with a state-of-the-art […]

19th November 2020

Metallization of nanoparticles on the cover

The article “Ionization-Induced Sub-cycle Metallization of Nanoparticles in Few-Cycle Pulses” by Qingcao Liu et al. was featured on the cover of ACS Photonics in the November 2020 issue. The cover was designed by Qingcao Liu with support by Lennart Seiffert and Matthias Kling, and shows the metallization of nanoparticles in few-cycle laser pulses. The hallmarks […]

16th November 2020

Prestigious fellowship for Wenbin Zhang

Dr. Wenbin Zhang, postdoc in the research group of Prof. Matthias Kling, has been awarded a very prestigious fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. With the Humboldt Research Fellowship, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation sponsors above-average qualified researchers from all over the world. During the fellowship, Dr. Zhang will work on directly probing and […]

24th October 2020

X-ray Light in Overdrive

An international collaboration, with physicists from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, and the King-Saud University in Riyad, has shown attosecond pulse generation under extreme conditions. The generation of coherent x-ray light by high-harmonic generation (HHG) with strong laser pulses is one of the major building blocks of attosecond science. It […]