Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics - Harshank Shrotriya
Temporal characterization of Attosecond pulses. Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK), Heidelberg, Germany. Work I joined the Quantum Dynamics and Control division at MPIK for 10 weeks for my summer internship. Ultrafast optics is useful in studying processes in nature which happen on a very small time scale. With the discovery of High Harmonic Generation it is possible to generate ultrashort Laser pulses with attosecond duration. But these pulses are of no use if they are not characterized before using them to observe other phenomenon (like observing Photoionization time delay). My work dealt with characterizing an attosecond time scale pulse in time domain so as to identify the intensity, phase variation and length (FWHM) of the pulse. For the first few weeks I read about algorithms used to characterize these pulses and discussed them with other PhD students in the group. I was assigned one particular PhD student whom I had already been corresponding with 2 months...