AlbaNova and Nordita Colloquium

Attosecond physics and the dream of an electron movie

by Prof. Eva Lindroth (Fysikum, Stockholm UNiversity)

Advances in laser technology have made it possible to produce light-pulses with a duration of only a few tens to a few hundreds of attoseconds. Since this is the time scale of electron dynamics it opens the exciting possibility to follow for example electron motion during a chemical reaction or the charge-migration that takes place before the nuclear motion in photo-induced processes. Exactly how this should be done is still the subject of intense research. In the talk I will discuss some of the methods that have been developed and how we can understand the time-domain measurement that has been performed for basic processes such as photoionization.