New laser captures nature's fastest processes

A team led by Assistant Professor Dr. Christian Brahms of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, will receive European Union funding equivalent to 2.3 million euros. The aim of the funding is to develop a new light source for attosecond laser pulses. This aims to fill gaps in Nobel Prize-winning technology.

5 years to build new laser technology

The team has five years to complete the mission. The new light source should enable extremely fast laser pulses to record nature's fastest processes in real time at as fast as one second.

An totosecond is equal to one trillionth of a second. This incredibly small unit of time is used primarily in physics, especially quantum mechanics and laser spectroscopy, to measure extremely fast phenomena, such as the behavior of electrons.

Using technology that can produce attosecond laser pulses could allow us to see some of the fastest processes in nature, such as: B. How plants absorb sunlight.

The Nobel Prize-winning work forms the basis for further development

The basis of the project is the work of Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krauss and Anne Lhuillier, which has earned the group the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2023. However, this work has also revealed a serious flaw in their attosecond technology. She can't see everything.

This deficiency is precisely the goal of the new research, says Dr. Opposite Christian Brahms SiteDaily “This is exactly what we will be working on – going beyond the limits of conventional laser sources in order to focus on basic research,” he explains.

doctor. Brahms adds that many of the most important achievements in the history of science “were made possible by observing nature at levels far beyond the limits of human perception.”

Disadvantage: Nobel Prize technology works with laboratory wavelengths

Brahms' idea was to create a new type of laser light that mimicked natural sunlight, but in very short flashes. The drawback of the Nobel Prize project is that the technology presented there can also generate very short pulses of light – but only in the ultraviolet or X-ray range.

This is a clear limitation, says Dr. Brahms. It is possible to capture “still images of some of the fastest microscopic processes in molecules and materials.” However, in nature, it would be “sunlight and not the wavelengths used in laboratory experiments” that would be involved.

The team's goal is therefore to “generate ultra-short duration laser pulses similar to conventional attosecond sources, but at the same ultraviolet and visible wavelengths that we get from the Sun.” This way everything can really be seen. In addition, “our knowledge of ultrafast processes is directly related to other fields such as photochemistry or materials science.”

The European Union encourages cutting-edge research

With the participation of six scientists, Dr. Brahms continued to develop and build prototypes. His project is among 50 other projects in the UK to receive a start-up grant from the European Research Council this year. He wants to support cutting-edge research in a variety of fields.

doctor. Brahms is happy to have received funding for his project, and points out that the success rate when applying for EU funding was only 14 percent. This means that his proposal is “officially one of the most dynamic and exciting research projects in Europe.”