Date/Time
Date(s) - 07/04/2010
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Title: AMO Physics With Ultrafast Hard and Soft Xray

Speaker: Dr. Phil Bucksbaum, Stanford University

Institute: Stanford University

Location: ABB 102

Description:

100 years ago, x-rays helped establish the atomic structure of matter, and also helped to motivate the development of quantum mechanics. Today, ultrafast hard and soft x-rays are beginning to reveal the quantum dynamics that occurs deep withim molecules subjected to strong laser fields, or undergoing chemical change.
I will describe two examples of this. (1) High harmonics generation shows how ultrafast optical lasers can control the motion of electrons with sub-femtosecond precision, sufficient to observe and alter the breaking of chemical bonds. (2) The SLAC Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), the worldâ??s first multigigawatt, sub-100-fsec source of hard x-rays, can initiate atomic nonlinear absorption through multiple sequential inner shell ionization, which can reveal ultrafast structural dynamics with Angstrom precision.