Fascination with Ultra3 (-short, intense, fast) Bullets of Light

Dr. Wolfgang Rudolph

Department of Physics and Astronomy,University of New Mexico

Ultrashort laser pulses are tools, sometimes called toys, with spectacular features in the hands of scientists and engineers. They can be as fast as one optical cycle, which amounts to a few femtoseconds (1 fs = 10-15 s) in the visible spectral region. Traveling with the speed of light these bullets have a geometrical length of only a few micrometers. When spatially focused the intensities can easily exceed 1018 W/cm2 and the corresponding electric field strengths are many orders of magnitude larger than the Coulomb field between electrons and the nucleus in an atom.Owing to these properties ultrashort laser pulses have continuously pushed the frontiers of current science and technology. They enable the observation of ultrafast processes in nature with unprecedented resolution. Novel microscopies for biological and medical applications have been invented that capitalize on nonlinear optical processes excited by femtosecond pulses. Micro and nanostructuring of materials has benefited from controlled interaction of fs pulses with materials under high excitation conditions.We will describe ongoing research of our group to understand laser induced breakdown of dielectric materials (laser damage), to produce fs beams with orbital angular momentum, and to explore fs four-wave mixing microscopy.

Speaker Biography: Dr. Rudolph is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Department of Electrical Engineering and has been appointed as a Regents' Professor since 2006. Dr. Rudolph received his Ph.D. in Physics from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany. Dr. Rudolph's awards and honors include Gustav Hertz Prize of the National Physical Society (1988), Prize of the Faculty of Natural Science (1989) and Fellow of the Optical Society of America. He has published more than 130 refereed and invited articles and co-authored two books including Ultrashort Laser Pulse Phenomena. His current research interests include development of molecular mid-infrared lasers, microscopy with femtosecond light pulses and ultrafast processes and intense laser-material interactions.

Friday, October 23rd at 12:15 pm

Center for High Technology Materials, Room 101

Refreshments will be served at the talk.