Professor Ursula Keller is the 2015 Frew Fellow and in addition to providing the Few Lecture at the 2015 Australasian Conference on Optics, Lasers and Spectroscopy (AZCOP) in Adelaide the Frew Fellow is also invited to visit universities and research institutions in a number of Australian cities. As part of this visit Professor Keller has offered to undertake public lectures.
Professor Ursula Keller is the Director of the National Center of Competence in Research for Molecular Ultrafast Science and Technology (MUST) and heads the Ultrafast Laser Physics Research Group at ETH Zurich. She was a co-founder of two high-tech companies: Time-Bandwidth Products (acquired by JDSU in 2014) and GigaTera, a venture capital funded telecom company (acquired by Time-Bandwidth). Previously she was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lund Institute of Technologies. In 1992, she invented and demonstrated the first passively mode-locked diode-pumped solid-state laser and solved a 25-year-old challenge. Her research interests are exploring and pushing the frontiers in ultrafast science and technology, including attosecond science. She received her Physics Diplom from ET H Zurich and PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University.
In 2013, the Laser Institute of America gave Professor Keller the Arthur L. Schawlow Award, which recognizes individuals who have made distinguished contributions to applications of lasers in science, industry, or education and in 2015 she received the OSA Charles H. Townes Award and the Geoffey Frew Fellowship from the Australian Academy of Science to present the Frew lecture at the 2015 Australasian Conference on Optics, Lasers and Spectroscopy (AZCOP) in Adelaide and to visit universities and research institutions in a number of Australian cities which this public lecture forms a part of.
Whether at her coffee machine in the morning, on her way to work in the car or at her computer in the office – Ursula Keller keeps seeing items in her daily life that were produced with the aid of laser processing. Nowadays, these powerful light sources are used in many places to shape surfaces or cut materials to the right size, and Keller has had a major hand in this. As a professor of experimental physics over 20 years ago, she developed SESAM technology that enables powerful laser light to be focused into ultrashort pulses. And it is these same, short, high-energy pulses that make it possible to process materials in a gentle, precise way. The further development of the lasers, however, is only part of Ursula Keller’s work. For her group also uses them to study ultrafast processes. Her cutting edge laser technology enabled for example the world’s most accurate clocks – the optical clock and the attoclock. With the optical clock we can measure a few centimeters of height differences as predicted by Einstein’s general relativity theory or can help to discover new planets. With the attoclock we can study the tunnel effect, a quantum-mechanical phenomenon that was previously impossible to investigate experimentally because it takes place at an inconceivable speed. In concrete terms, it concerns how quickly an electron excited with light can be transported away from an atom which can take place in the space of attoseconds, i.e. a billionths of a billionth of a second. This talk will give a general introduction how we can access a new regime of measurements in our “ultrafast world” which has a big impact on our everyday lives. For without these extremely speedy processes there would be no photosynthesis, no breathing and no eyesight.
Professor Ursula Keller is the 2015 Frew Fellow and in addition to providing the Few Lecture at the 2015 Australasian Conference on Optics, Lasers and Spectroscopy (AZCOP) in Adelaide the Frew Fellow is also invited to visit universities and research institutions in a number of Australian cities. As part of this visit Professor Keller has offered to undertake public lectures.
Professor Ursula Keller is the Director of the (MUST) and heads the at ETH Zurich. She was a co-founder of two high-tech companies: Time-Bandwidth Products (acquired by JDSU in 2014) and GigaTera, a venture capital funded telecom company (acquired by Time-Bandwidth). Previously she was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lund Institute of Technologies. In 1992, she invented and demonstrated the first passively mode-locked diode-pumped solid-state laser and solved a 25-year-old challenge. Her research interests are exploring and pushing the frontiers in ultrafast science and technology, including attosecond science. She received her Physics Diplom from ET H Zurich and PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University.
In 2013, the Laser Institute of America gave Professor Keller the Arthur L. Schawlow Award, which recognizes individuals who have made distinguished contributions to applications of lasers in science, industry, or education and in 2015 she received the OSA Charles H. Townes Award and the Geoffey Frew Fellowship from the Australian Academy of Science to present the Frew lecture at the 2015 Australasian Conference on Optics, Lasers and Spectroscopy (AZCOP) in Adelaide and to visit universities and research institutions in a number of Australian cities which this public lecture forms a part of.
Whether at her coffee machine in the morning, on her way to work in the car or at her computer in the office – Ursula Keller keeps seeing items in her daily life that were produced with the aid of laser processing. Nowadays, these powerful light sources are used in many places to shape surfaces or cut materials to the right size, and Keller has had a major hand in this. As a professor of experimental physics over 20 years ago, she developed SESAM technology that enables powerful laser light to be focused into ultrashort pulses. And it is these same, short, high-energy pulses that make it possible to process materials in a gentle, precise way. The further development of the lasers, however, is only part of Ursula Keller’s work. For her group also uses them to study ultrafast processes. Her cutting edge laser technology enabled for example the world’s most accurate clocks – the optical clock and the attoclock. With the optical clock we can measure a few centimeters of height differences as predicted by Einstein’s general relativity theory or can help to discover new planets. With the attoclock we can study the tunnel effect, a quantum-mechanical phenomenon that was previously impossible to investigate experimentally because it takes place at an inconceivable speed. In concrete terms, it concerns how quickly an electron excited with light can be transported away from an atom which can take place in the space of attoseconds, i.e. a billionths of a billionth of a second. This talk will give a general introduction how we can access a new regime of measurements in our “ultrafast world” which has a big impact on our everyday lives. For without these extremely speedy processes there would be no photosynthesis, no breathing and no eyesight.
The University of Melbourne, Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre A,Spencer Road Victoria false DD/MM/YYYY© 2024 Australian Academy of Science
