Passion for extreme light

Life and Matter Sciences Conference Tuesday, May, 28, 2019 19:30 hours Madrid

General information:

Venue: Fundación Ramón Areces. Vitruvio, 5. 28006. Madrid.

Free admission. Necessary previous online registration. Limited capacity. Simultaneous interpretation.

Organized by:

Fundación Ramón Areces

In cooperation with:

Centro de Láseres Pulsados (CLPU)

Multimedia

Gérard Mourou's full lecture

Documents

Prof. Gérard Mourou_28_05_2019

Audio

gerardmourou_vo

See more media from this activity

Description
Programme

Extreme-light laser is a universal source providing a vast range of high energy radiations and particles along with the highest field, highest pressure, temperature and acceleration. It offers the possibility to shed light on some of the remaining unanswered questions in fundamental physics like the genesis of cosmic rays with energies in excess of 10²⁰ eV or the loss of information in black-holes. Using wake-field acceleration some of these fundamental questions could be studied in the laboratory. In addition extreme-light makes possible the study of the structure of vacuum and particle production in "empty" space which is one of the field’s ultimate goal, reaching into the fundamental QED and possibly QCD regimes. Looking beyond today’s intensity horizon, we will introduce a new concept that could make possible the generation of attosecond-zeptosecond high energy coherent pulse, de facto in x-ray domain, opening at the Schwinger level, the zettawatt, and PeV regime; the next chapter of laser-matter interaction.

Tuesday, May 28

19:00 h.

Attendee check-in

19:30 h.

Welcome

Raimundo Pérez-Hernández y Torra
Director Fundación Ramón Areces.

Presents

Luis Roso
Director of Centro de Láseres Pulsados (CLPU). Universidad de Salamanca.

Passion for extreme light

Gérard Mourou
Nobel Prize in Physics 2018. University of Michigan. École Polytechnique (Palaiseau, France).

Gérard Mourou is a French scientist, distinguished pioneer in the field of electric engineering and high intensity lasers. He has been Director of the Laboratory of Applied Optics at ENSTA (École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées), at the Paris-Saclay campus. He is member of the Haut Collège at the École Polytechnique in Palaiseau and Emiritus Professor at the University of Michigan, in which he created in 1990 the Center of Ultrafast Optical Science. In 2018 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with Donna Strickland, for the invention of chirped pulse amplification, a technique which allows to produce ultrashort and high intensity laser pulses (Peta watts).