Professor Eva Lindroth will deliver a lecture titled 'Attosecond science and the elusive character of the electron'.

An abstract and biography can be found below.

Abstract:

The birth of attosecond science dates back to the discovery of the process of High-Harmonic Generation in the late 1980’s by Anne L’Huillier and co-workers, and to the first demonstrations of the generation of attosecond pulses in the beginning of the new millennium by Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz. Today attosecond science is an interdisciplinary research field, with applications in physics, chemistry, biology and quantum information science.

Right from the start attoscience was holding the bold promise that it would enable the study of electron motion in the time domain. A first question is however how it can be done? Electrons are truly quantum objects which cannot be captured by a ``snapshot'' regardless of how short the `exposure'' time is. Instead the dynamics, during for example a photoionization process, is encoded in the amplitude and phase of the released electron wave packet.  A key quantity is the spectral derivative of this phase, the group delay. It reflects the delay or advance of the electron when it travels through the atomic potential to eventually emerge in the continuum: attosecond interferometric techniques have made such phase information available.

During this colloquium I will discuss the how the understanding of the attosecond delay in photoionization has developed, and how the study of phase information in atoms has initiated studies in a vast range of quantum systems.

Biography:

Eva Lindroth obtained her Ph.D. from Gothenburg University in 1987 and subsequently continued as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford. Since 2001, she has been a Professor of Physics at Stockholm University. Her research focuses on atomic theory in general and many-body theory in particular and she often collaborates closely with experimental groups. In recent years, her main interest has been exploring how electron dynamics can be studied with attosecond pulses. Eva is an Honorary Doctor at Lund University and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.