Thursday October 19, 1:00pm in SCGP room 102
Speaker: Thomas Allison
Title: Attosecond Optics and Attosecond Physics: the Good, the Bad, and the Maybe
Abstract: In this lecture I will discuss the work recognized by this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Pierre Agostini, Anne L’Huillier, and Ferenc Krausz for their pioneering work on the generation and characterization of attosecond pulses of light. Specifically, we will explore the physics of matter illuminated by intense ultrashort optical pulses with electric fields on the order of 1 V/Å, and how seemingly violent phenomena in this regime can in fact be highly coherent. This coherence enables the synthesis of controlled waveforms of extreme ultraviolet and soft x-ray light which now find applications in diverse fields ranging from ultrafast spectroscopy of molecules and materials to precision tests of quantum electrodynamics. I will present a tutorial both on the basic physics and historical perspective, including important contributions made by researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University.
Bio: Thomas K. Allison earned his B.S. in Engineering Physics from Cornell University in 2003 and his Ph. D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. After a postdoc at JILA in Boulder, CO, he joined the faculty at Stony Brook University in 2013 as a professor in both the Physics and Chemistry departments. He is the recipient of the U.S. Dept. of Energy Early Career Award, the U.S. Air Force of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, and the Stony Brook University Discovery Prize. Allison’s research group develops new laser technology to tackle a wide range of problems in the field of ultrafast spectroscopy.
