When: Thursday, December 7 at 4pm

Speaker: Prof. Michael Zuerch (University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory).

Speaker Bio: Prof. Michael Zuerch earned his PhD in 2014 from Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany, under the mentorship of Prof. Spielmann. His doctoral work focused on developing high-resolution imaging techniques using attosecond sources. After his PhD, he pursued postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley (2015-2017) with Professors Leone and Neumark, where he led pioneering studies in attosecond spectroscopy to investigate dynamics in solid materials. In 2018, Prof. Zuerch established an independent Max Planck Research Group at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin. The following year, he joined UC Berkeley’s Department of Chemistry as an Assistant Professor and concurrently serves as a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research team is at the forefront of exploring structural, carrier, and spin dynamics in cutting-edge quantum materials, heterostructures, and surface and interface phenomena, addressing key questions in materials science and physical chemistry. Prof. Zuerch is renowned for developing nonlinear extreme ultraviolet spectroscopy (XUV-SHG), a novel technique that allows for the study of interfaces in complex chemical environments with elemental selectivity. Since 2020, he has been the director of the California Interfacial Science Institute, a University of California-funded initiative aimed at advancing our understanding of chemical processes at interfaces, integrating both experimental and theoretical approaches. His contributions to linear and nonlinear XUV spectroscopy have been recognized with multiple accolades, including the Fresnel Prize 2021 from the European Physical Society, the Hellman Fellowship, and the W. M. Keck Foundation Science and Engineering Research Award. In 2023, he received the prestigious DOE Early Career award.

Abstract: How long does it take for a photoelectron to be emitted from a molecule once ionized by light? What are the frequencies and pathways of electron oscillations along a molecule’s backbone under light’s influence and how does this impact chemical reactions? And how swiftly do excited electrons in a material scatter, and through which routes? The advent of attosecond pulse technology, our ‘ultimate stopwatch’, now allows us to directly observe these fastest phenomena in nature and answer these pivotal questions.

The journey of attosecond pulses, as fascinating as their current applications, began with the surprising discovery of high harmonic generation and its mechanistic understanding in the late 1980s to early 1990s. This was followed by over a decade of significant technological advancements, culminating in the early 2000s with the isolation of single attosecond pulses. It is these groundbreaking initial discoveries and advancements in characterizing and isolating single attosecond pulses that have been honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics 2023.

In this colloquium, I will briefly review the history of these discoveries, elucidate the underlying technologies, and introduce the foundational models and mechanisms. We will explore key results that have shaped the field of attosecond science, particularly in atomic and molecular dynamics, chemical dynamics, and materials research. In the context of applying attosecond spectroscopy to study quantum materials I will showcase some of the results from my laboratory. To conclude, I will present a forward-looking perspective on the opportunities attosecond science presents and what we might anticipate in the coming decade.