Interdisciplinary Lecture by Prof. Marcelo Ciappina (GTIIT, Physics)

Title

Attosecond Physics at the nanoscale: the final frontier

Speaker

Prof. Marcelo Ciappina (GTIIT, Physics)

Host

Prof. Jidong Gu (GTIIT, Env)

Date & Time

Mar. 07 2022, Monday, 19:00pm-20:00pm

Location

E309 (Education Building, 3rd floor)

Zoom Link: https://gtiit.zoom.us/j/93823676693

Abstract

Recently two, a priori, different branches of physics have started to merge. One is attosecond physics, that deals with, both theoretical and experimentally, the phenomena which take place when ultrashort laser pulses, with durations ranging from the attosecond (10^-18 s) to the femtosecond (10^-15 s) time scale, interact with atoms, molecules or solids. This subject has reached great maturity on the basis of well-established theoretical developments and the understanding of different nonlinear phenomena, as well as thanks to the formidable advances in experimental techniques.

The second branch involves the manipulation and engineering of mesoscopic systems, e.g. solids, metals, dielectrics, with nanometric (10^-9 m) precision, a scale that was only reached recently. In this way, it is possible to design and build bulk matter samples which pave the way to study light-matter interaction in a completely new regime.

In this seminar I’ll first introduce the subject and after I’ll summarize the theoretical work we have done to tackle the underlying physics of laser-matter processes driven by spatially and temporal synthesized fields [1-3]. By using classical, semiclassical and quantum mechanical theoretical tools we were able to shed some light about the modifications produced by spatially inhomogeneous fields -fields that present spatial variations in a scale comparable to the one of the electron dynamics. At the end of the talk I’ll present a brief summary of other current and future projects.

[1] M. F. Ciappina, et al. Attosecond Physics at the nanoscale, Rep. Prog. Phys 80, 054401 (2017)

https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6633/aa574e

[2] J. Schoetz, et al. Perspective on Petahertz Electronics and Attosecond Nanoscopy, ACS Photonics 6, 3039-3056 (2019)

https://doi.org/10.1021/acsphotonics.9b01188

[3] Y. Park. et al, Recent Trends in High-order Harmonic Generation in Solids, Advances in Physics: X (invited review) 7, XXXX (2022).

https://doi.org/10.1080/23746149.2021.2003244

Bio

DSc Dr Marcelo Ciappina completed the PhD in Physics at Balseiro Institute, Argentina, in March 2005 and the Research Professor in Physico-Mathematical Sciences (DSc) dissertation (Habilitation) at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic in June 2019. After several years of Postdoctoral and Senior positions all around the world, including, amongst others, various Max Planck Institutes in Germany (MPI-K Heidelberg, MPQ Garching and MPI-PKS Dresden), the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Spain, the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI)-Beamlines in Czech Republic, the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) (A* STAR, Singapore) and the Auburn University (USA), he joined the GTIIT in fall 2020 as an Associate Professor. DSc Dr Marcelo Ciappina is a top-class expert in theory and numerical simulations of nonlinear laser interactions with atoms, molecules and complex systems. The most important effects during these interactions are high-harmonic generation (HHG), the generation and application of attosecond extreme ultraviolet (XUV) pulses, above-threshold ionization (ATI) and non-sequential ionization (NSI).  In a few recent years he is one of the pioneers in a novel and fascinating field that merges two relatively new areas of research: attosecond and nanoscale physics. This research area particularly studies how nanometer-spatially inhomogeneous laser induced fields modify the laser-driven electron dynamics. Consequently, this field property has profound impact on pivotal processes such as ATI and HHG. DSc Dr Ciappina is developing analytical and numerical methods for the description of the above physical processes and he is carrying out numerical simulations supporting different strong laser-matter experiments worldwide. He participates in the interpretation of experimental results and also in the proposals for new experiments. DSc Dr Ciappina regularly publishes in very prestigious scientific journals (Nature Communications, Physical Review X, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review A). He is author or co-author of more than 130 papers in impacted journals listed in WoS. He is the first author of a authoritative review paper Attosecond Physics at the nanoscale published in Report on Progress in Physics (IF 14.311) in 2017. According to WoS (at Oct 2020), DSc Dr Ciappina has an h-index 24 and his papers were cited 2110 times with rapidly growing citation number (an average of around 300 times during the last 3 years).