SCIENTIA SUPREMA - Colloqium Lectures WUT - Professor Czesław Radzewicz

Dr Czesław Radzewicz, a physicist, currently a professor at the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, head of the Optical Division. His scientific interests include: laser physics, nonlinear optics, ultrafast spectroscopy. He has led the team which built optical atomic clocks in the National Laboratory for Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics.

Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 has been awarded for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics; one of them being the Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA). The technique has been invented by Donna Strickland and her back then PhD advisor Gérard Mourou and published in Strickland’s first research paper [1]. It has enabled a new generation of tabletop lasers that produce very brief pulses of intense light with instantaneous powers exceeding 1 PW. Such light interacts with matter in dramatically nonlinear ways, which has opened new physical regimes of experimental and theoretical explorations. Specifically, high-order harmonic generation has been discovered, leading recently to the development of attoscience. Another spectacular application of the CPA-based systems is the ability to directly accelerate charged particles by means of laser light. These and other physical examples of strong laser light applications will be mentioned, none of which would have been possible without the invention of the CPA.

_{[1] D. Strickland and G. Mourou, Opt. Commun. 56, 219 (1985).}

Colloquium Lecture will take place on Thursday, 29th of November 2018, at 12.15.00 PM at the Faculty of Physics Warsaw University of Technology, room Audytorium.

We invite you to see the picture from the event in the photo gallery.