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, Research Professor in 2012 and was elected Fellow of the Optical Society of America OSA in 2015.

Research interests

The aim of our research is the investigation of ultrafast events that are caused by electrons inside atoms, molecules, solids and biological matter. 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 is diverse and includes pioneering development of new light sources that are key enablers for coherent soft-X-ray generation across the water window (300-500 eV) and attosecond emission below the atomic unit of time (24 as). These sources enable element selective and time resolved measurements, lensless imaging as well as using electron recollision to image bond distances in molecules. 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 attosecone temporal resolution. Moreover, we established the first source of isolated attosecond soft X-ray pulses which achieves real-time measurements of electronic synamics on the attosecond scale in combination with the element selectivity of X-rays. A first investigation shows correlated electron dynamics of a 2D material in real time.