Orateur
Prof.
Marie Barthelemy
(Institut de Physique et Chimie des Matériaux de Strasbourg)
Description
Ultrafast lasers produce light pulses as short as a few femtoseconds. These durations are of theorder or smaller than electron and vibration relaxation times: experiments using a sequence of
pulses can thus give valuable information about the dynamics of excited states in a large panel of
materials, from atomic to solid-state physics and chemistry. Electrons in semiconductor
nanostructures, vibrational states in biomolecules, spins in magnets can be thus tracked over their
lifetime. Moreover, the coherence of laser pulses can be exploited: quantum superposition of
states can optically be addressed and determined. That gives rise to the possibility of developing
new procedures for the optical control and measurement of atoms, molecules, nano-objects...
