Jens Biegert

Institut de Ciències Fotòniques (ICFO)

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

Jens Biegert received his PhD from the TU Munich in 2001, and headed research on ultrafast pulse generation and strong field physics at ETH Zurich from 2001 until 2006. In 2007 he was appointed ICREA Research Professor and established the Attoscience and Ultrafast Optics group at ICFO. He has over 130 journal publications, authored 7 book chapters (2 chapters are published in encyclopedias), given over 100 invited talks and edited one book. He has served on several conference and editorial panels and became Associate Editor or AIP Photonics in 2015. He is fellow of the German National Academic Foundation, was recipient of a Marie Curie Fellowship in 2001, the OSA Allen Price in 2004, was named Research Assistant Professor in the USA in 2001 and Research Professor in 2012 and was elected Fellow of the Optical Society of America OSA in 2015.


Research interests

The power of attoscience and ultrafast optics lies in the incredible time resolution that gives access to observing the triggering events that are caused by electronic rearrangement and ultimately lead, to molecular dissociation, chemical reactions, excitonic energy transfer or even biological function. Our research includes pioneering light sources and coherent soft-X-ray generation across the water window (300-500 eV) and attosecond emission below the atomic unit of time (24 as). In 2016, we succeeded in taking the first snapshots of how a bond breaks in a single molecule and how one of its protons gets ejected. The measurement demonstrated tracking all atoms of an individual molecule thereby achieving a combined sub-atomic spatial and attosecond temporal resolution. Moreover, we demonstrated first isolated attosecond soft X-ray pulses for real-time measurements of electronic dynamics and a first investigation shows correlated electron dynamics of a 2D material in real time.

Selected publications

– Wolter B, Pullen MG, Le A-T, Baudisch M, Doblhoff-Dier K, Senftleben A, Hemmer M, Schröter D, Ullrich J, Pfeifer T, Moshammer R, Gräfe S, Vendrell O, Lin CD & Biegert J 2016, “Ultrafast electron diffraction imaging of bond breaking in di-ionized acetylene”, Science, 354, 308.

– Baudisch M, Wolter B, Pullen M, Hemmer M & Biegert J 2016, ‘High power multi-color OPCPA source with simultaneous femtosecond deep-UV to mid-IR outputs’, Optics Letters, 41, 15, 3583 – 3586.

– Suárez N, Chacón A, Ciappina MF, Wolter B, Biegert J & Lewenstein M 2016, “Above-threshold ionization and laser-induced electron diffraction in diatomic molecules”, Phys. Rev. A 94, 043423.

– Teichmann SM, Silva F, Cousin SL, Hemmer M & Biegert J 2016, ‘0.5-keV Soft X-ray attosecond continua’, Nature Communications, 7, 11493.

– Sanchez D, Hemmer M, Baudisch M, Cousin SL, Zawilski K, Schunemann P, Chalus O, Simon-Boisson C & Biegert J 2016, ‘7 mu m, ultrafast, sub-millijoule-level mid-infrared optical parametric chirped pulse amplifier pumped at 2 um’, Optica, 3, 2, 147 – 150.

– Pullen MG, Wolter B, Le A-T, Baudisch M, Sclafani M, Pires H, Schroeter CD, Ullrich J, Moshammer R, Pfeifer T, Lin CD & Biegert J 2016, ‘Influence of orbital symmetry on diffraction imaging with rescattering electron wave packets’, Nature Communications, 7, 11922.