Sujet de stage / Master 2 Internship

The aim of the internship is to generate attosecond pulses using a new high-power Ytterbium laser and to use them to investigate the ultrafast photoemission dynamics of gases and liquids, in particular, to image in real time the ejection of electronic wavepackets.

Recently, the generation and application of attosecond pulses (1 as=10−18 s) have made impressive progress, rewarded by this year’s Nobel Prize [1]. These ultrashort pulses are generated from the strong nonlinear interaction of short intense laser pulses with gas jets [2]. A new laser technology based on Ytterbium is promising increases in average power/reprate of more than one order of magnitude as compared to the current Titanium:Sapphire technology. This opens new prospects for the exploration of matter at the electron intrinsic timescale. Attosecond spectroscopy thus allows studying in real time the quantum process of photoemission, shooting the 3D movie of electronic wavepacket ejection [3,4], and studying quantum decoherence resulting from, e.g., electron-ion entanglement.
The experimental work will include the development and operation of a setup installed on the ATTOLab laser platform allowing: i) the generation of attosecond XUV pulses from a new Ytterbium laser, ii) their characterization using quantum interferometry, iii) their use in photoemission spectroscopy. The student will be trained in ultrafast optics, atomic and molecular physics, quantum optics and will acquire a good mastery of charged particle spectrometry. The continuation on a PhD project is advised.
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2023/summary/
[2] Y. Mairesse, et al., Science 302, 1540 (2003)
[3] V. Gruson, et al., Science 354, 734 (2016)
[4] A. Autuori, et al., Science Advances 8, eabl7594 (2022)