Ferenc Krausz is a Hungarian-Austrian physicist, whose research team has generated and measured the first attosecondlight pulse and used it for capturing electrons’ motion inside atoms, marking the birth of attophysics.
Ferenc Krausz and his research team were the first to create and measure a light pulse lasting less than one femtosecond. The researchers used these attosecond light pulses to make the inner-atomic movement of electrons observable in real time. These results marked the beginning of attosecond physics. In the 1990s, the groundwork for this landmark was done by Ferenc Krausz and his team with a large number of innovations to the further development of the femtosecond laser technology to its ultimate limits – towards light pulses which carry the major part of their energy in one single oscillation of the electromagnetic field. An indispensable prerequisite for the generation of such short light pulses is the high-precision control of the delay of the different color components of broadband light over one entire octave. Aperiodic multi-layers emerging from a collaboration of Ferenc Krausz and Robert Szipöcs made such a control possible and are indispensable in today's femtosecond laser systems. In 2001, Ferenc Krausz and his group were able for the first time not only to generate but also to measure attosecond light pulses by means of intense laser pulses consisting of one to two wave cycles. With this, they were shortly thereafter also able to trace the movement of electrons on the subatomic scale in real time. The control of the wave form of the femtosecond pulse demonstrated by Ferenc Krausz and his team and the resulting reproducible attosecond pulses enabled the establishment of the attosecond measuring technique as the technological basis for experimental attosecond physics today. Over the past few years, Ferenc Krausz and his coworkers succeeded with these tools to control electrons in molecules and – for the first time – observe in real time a large number of fundamental electron processes such as tunneling, charge transport, coherent EUV emission, delayed photoelectric effect, valence electron movement and the control of the optical and electrical properties of dielectrics. These results have been archived with international cooperations with groups of scientists such as Joachim Burgdörfer, Paul Corkum, Theodor Hänsch, Misha Ivanov, Ulrich Heinzmann, Stephen Leone, Robin Santra, Mark Stockman and Marc Vrakking.
