Ferenc Krausz: Breaking the Wall to Attoseconds

Ferenc Krausz (born 1962 in Mór/Hungary) earned his degree in Electrical Engineering at the Technical University Budapest (1985). He completed his doctorate in Laser Physics at the Technische Universität (TU) Vienna (1991) where he habilitated in the same research field in 1993, took up assistant professorship in 1998 and full professorship in 1999. In 2003 Ferenc Krausz was appointed Director of the Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching. In October 2004 he became professor at the Faculty of Physics of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich and has since then held the Chair of Experimental Physics – Laser Physics.
In a series of experiments performed between 2001 and 2004 his team succeeded in producing and measuring isolated attosecond pulses of light and applying them for the first real-time observation of atomic-scale electronic motions. These achievements earned him the reputation as the co-founder (along with Paul Corkum) of the field of Attosecond Physics, a scientific discipline devoted to real-time observation and control of electron phenomena, as also acknowledged by their selection as 2015Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates. More recently, he turned his attention to capitalizing on attosecond techniques for disease detection by the molecular fingerprinting of human bio-fluids. For his contributions to establishing the field of Attosecond Science, Ferenc Krausz was announced as a recipient of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics, together with Anne L´Huillier and Pierre Agostini