One of the most fundamental processes in nature is the photoemission of electrons from solid targets. This process forms the basis for optoelectronics, where light can trigger electron transfer, amplification, and emission, and electron injection and excitation can result in the emission of light. The decrease in the dimensions of electronic and optoelectronic circuitry is directly linked to a potential increase in their speed of operation. On nanometer (10-9 m) dimensions electrons typically move on attosecond to femtosecond timescales (10-18 – 10-15 s). The inherent link of these spatial and temporal dimensions has recently led to the development of the new field of attosecond nanophysics.
The colloquium will introduce metrology that permits to obtain information with highest time and spatial resolution. Recent results where such techniques have been applied to trace attosecond electron dynamics in nanoparticles and nanoantennas will be highlighted. Intense few-cycle light pulses with electric fields that can be tailored on attosecond timescales are applied to control electron dynamics and emission from nanostructures. As an example for this powerful control, the “attosecond electron catapult” will be introduced, where Nano focusing was exploited to steer both time and direction of the electron emission.
Biography
Prof. Dr. Matthias F. Kling is a professor for ultrafast nanophotonics in the faculty of physics at LMU Munich. He is also the head of the Max Planck Research Group “Attosecond Imaging” at Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Garching, Germany. He is the project leader in the DFG excellence cluster “Munich Center for Advanced Photonics (MAP)” since 2007 and the group leader in the graduate school “International Max-Planck Research School of Advanced Photon Science (IMPRS-APS)” since 2008 (He has been the coordinator of IMPRS-APS since 2014.). He has been a visiting professor in the Physics Department in King-Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and has been an adjunct professor in the Department of Physics, Postech Univeristy, Pohang, South Korea. From 2012-2013, he worked as an assistant professor in Kansas State University in USA and was a DOE early career group leader. Prof. Dr. Kling has over 130 scientific publications with an h-index of 40 and around 7000 citations. He has written 7 book chapters on attosecond physics and ultrafast physics. During his career, Prof. Dr. Kling has been recognized by many prizes, such as the Nernst-Haber-Bodenstein Prize by German Bunsen Society in 2012, Heisenberg fellow and Emmy-Noether fellow by DFG, Marie Curie fellow by EU in 2004 and etc.