On the afternoon of 27 May, the Congress Centre hosted an IST Distinguished Lecture co-organised by the Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion (IPFN) and the Department of Physics at Instituto Superior Técnico. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics last year, Anne L’Huillier gave a lecture titled ‘The route to attosecond pulses’ to a packed auditorium, tracing the chronology of research into ultrashort light pulses.
Just as a violin produces sounds with several different frequencies simultaneously, so can an excited atom or molecule produce very short pulses of light with well-defined frequencies. Anne L’Huillier’s research is centered around high-order harmonic generation in gases and its applications. The discovery of these high-order harmonics was made at the end of the 1980s and served as a milestone for atomic and molecular physics.
One of the most coveted applications for these pulses today is in the field of ultrafast electrodynamic imaging – because they last for attoseconds (1 attosecond = 0.000.000.000.000.001 seconds), these light pulses could make it possible to follow the dynamics of electrons, ‘photographing’ their movements in greater detail than is currently possible. The work that earned Anne L’Huillier, Ferenc Krausz and Pierre Agostini the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics consisted in the development of experimental methods that make it possible to generate light pulses lasting attoseconds, to study electron dynamics.
According to the scientist, the applications for these pulses do not end there: she predicted that they could play an important role in areas such as attosecond chemistry, condensed matter physics and atomic spectroscopy. She also hypothesised that they could open the door to new techniques for controlling transistor chips, among other industrial applications.
Anne L’Huillier ended the Distinguished Lecture on a note of inspiration for the students and researchers in the audience, She showed a photograph of her receiving the Nobel Prize at a ceremony with the King of Sweden – “if you’re in the right place at the right time, maybe you’ll end up here”.
