On the occasion of the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Prof. Ferenc Krausz last December, the Directorate of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics under the current leadership of Prof. Ignacio Cirac hosted a symposium in honor of their colleague on February 21, 2024.
Under the title “Why attoseconds?”, Ferenc Krausz and former companions from the early days of attosecond physics gave lively insights into the research that began in Vienna at the end of the 1990s and continued with the generation of the first attosecond pulse in 2001. In his introduction, Ferenc Krausz described how it was possible for the first time to detect the movements of electrons with the help of attosecond pulses and referred to promising applications of the developed ultrashort pulse technology in the field of early diagnosis of diseases, which are being researched by attoworld´s scientific groups, such as BIRD, FRIS and Data Science in cooperation with the Center for Molecular Fingerprinting in Hungary. In the presentations by Prof. Alexander Fuerbach (Macquarie University, Australia), Dr. Michael Hentschel (Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria) and Prof. Reinhard Kienberger (TU Munich), the important research developments were traced in an entertaining way. In addition to photographs and documents, which also impressively captured the conditions almost 30 years ago, the speakers were united by their charming Austrian dialect and one actually felt a little transported to Vienna at the TU. Last but not least, Dr. Ernst Fill (MPQ) gave a scientific lecture on laser research in the 20th century and its ground-breaking findings, and former colleague Dr. Hanieh Fattahi (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Erlangen) referred about her research “In the blink of an attosecond”, before the event came to an end with a champagne reception and snacks, intensive discussions and an exchange of memories.
