Watching electron and exciton dynamics on femto- to attosecond timescales
Date, Time: January 24, 2024 , 13:00 – 14:00
Speaker: Prof. Ralph Ernstorfer (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany)
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier for the generation of attosecond light pulses. I will give a brief review of the technological development enabling the underlying process of high-harmonic generation and the birth of attosecond science as a new research field. I will discuss how ultrashort pulses in the extreme ultraviolet spectrum enable the investigation of the fastest electronic processes in crystals. Starting with the technique of attosecond streaking, I discuss how the intrinsic duration of the photoemission process can be resolved [1]. On the basis of this enabling technology, high-harmonic generation advanced a range of other spectroscopic techniques, especially time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (trARPES. We advanced the technique to access all key properties of many-body states like excitons with multidimensional photoemission spectroscopy. I will exemplify these approaches for excitons in transition metal dichalcogenide semiconductors [1]. In addition, we studied excitons in molecular crystals and investigated the singlet-exciton-fission process in the molecular crystal pentacene and revealed the hybrid-orbital character of the singlet state as well as the disputed mechanism of the fission process [2].
References
- S. Neppl et al., Direct observation of electron propagation and dielectric screening on the atomic length scale, Nature 517, 342 (2015).
- S. Dong et al., Direct measurement of key exciton properties: Energy, dynamics, and spatial distribution of the wave function, Natural Sciences 1, e10010 (2021).
- A. Neef et al., Orbital-resolved observation of singlet fission, Nature 616, 275 (2023).
Chairman: Prof. Jacek Gapiński
https://mtpr.amu.edu.pl/event/electron-and-exciton-dynamics/