Date: Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Time:  2:00 PM to 3:00 PM

Location: CHTM, Room 101 and Zoom

Speaker:

Professor Jens Biegert of ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences, Castelldefels (Barcelona), Spain ICREA, Barcelona, Spain

Abstract:

Chemical reactions are ubiquitous but how do they really work? For instance, to make the fibers and plastics we use all around us, chemical industry uses a process called polymerization. Polymerization works by using carbon ring molecules, somehow splitting open the ring and docking one open ring to another. The “somehow” is the secret of chemical industry and the process can be complicated, using catalyzers, pressure and temperature. Considering that about 19% of the global energy budget is spent on chemical functionalization, and only growth is expected, it is paramount that we reduce its energy footprint. At the same time, it is interesting for chemical industry to improve efficiency of this process as it directly impacts a 0.5 trillion USD market. I will show how attosecond spectroscopy elucidates the entire process of ring opening for the first time. A time-energy measurement allows to disentangle the various physical process and quantum many-body interaction between electrons, and nuclei. Clearly, understanding the quantum many-body interaction between these fundamental building blocks holds the key to advancing fundamental science and, at the same time, directly leads to applications as for the example of polymerization.

I will explain how we make attosecond pulses and how we apply them to the problem that I described
above.

Biography:

Jens Biegert is ICREA Professor at ICFO and leads experimental research on Attoscience and Ultrafast Optics.

Biegert received the PhD in Physics in 2001 from the Technische Universität München on work at the University of New Mexico in the USA under the supervision of Jean-Claude Diels. The topic of the PhD the physics of multiphoton coherent excitation of atomic sodium with application for astronomic guidestars. After his PhD, he went for his Habilitation to lead a group on attosecond science at ETH Zürich. Since 2007 at ICFO, he has pioneered mid-IR photonics, attosecond soft X-rays and laser-induced electron diffraction which led to breakthroughs in imaging chemical dynamics and carrier motion in quantum materials. Presently, he coordinates a European Commission FET Consortium and is part of two further FET consortia. Jens Biegert holds an appointment as Adjunct Professor at the University of New Mexico and is Guest Professor at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society at Berlin. He is actively involved in the scientific community, e.g. as co-author of the whitebook with Gérard Mourou that lead to the construction of the 1.2-Billion-Euro European Extreme Light Infrastructures. He serves on the Board of Directors of OPTICA, Chair of the Meetings Council, on the Strategic Planning council Finance Council. He was on the Board of Chairs of ARIE, the Analytical Research Infrastructures of Europe which represents 7 networks of European infrastructures with 40,000 researchers. He led Europe’s foremost laser network, “Laserlab-Europe” which unites 46 leading research infrastructures across 22 European countries as its Executive Director. He is Topical Editor of OPTICA and AAAS/CAS Ultrafast Science, Fellow of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, Fellow of OPTICA, Fellow of the American Physical Society, recipient of the Thousand Talents Program Award of the Peoples Republic of China, the OSA Allen Prize, and Bessel Prize of the Humboldt Foundation, ERC Advanced Grant and ERC Proof of Concept Grant holder.