Juhannus lecture: The world of atoms at the attosecond time scale

In her speech, Anne L'Huillier will talk about the world of atoms at the attosecond ti me scale. When an intense laser interacts with a gas of atoms, high-order h armonics are generated. In the time domain, this radiation forms a train of extremely short light pulses, of the order of 100 attoseconds. Attosec ond pulses enable the stu dy of electron dynamics in atoms and molecules using pump-probe techniques. Her presentation will highlight key steps in the field of attosecond science.

Anne L'Huillier is a Swedish/French researcher in attosecond science. She started her career at the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique, in Saclay, France, as a PhD student until 1986, then as a permanent researcher until 1995. She was postdoc at Chalmers Institute of Technology, Gothenburg. Sweden in 1986, and at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA in 1988, and a visiting scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1993. She moved to Lund University, Sweden, and became full professor there in 1997. Her research is focused on high-order h armonic generation in gases and its applications, particularly in attosecond science. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 together with Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the stu dy of electron dynamics in matter.