New Saudi Laser Lab

King Saud University in Riyadh has opened a cutting-edge laser laboratory in collaboration with Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich, the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching, and attosecond laser pioneer Ferenc Krausz.

Inaugurated 16 February with talks from laser pioneers including Gérard Mourou, Paul Corkum, and Nobel laureate for physics Ted Hänsch, the new Attosecond Science Laboratory (ASL) represents the first such laboratory in the Arabic world, according to MPQ.

Researchers from the three institutions will use the new Saudi facility to investigate one of the fastest phenomena known in nature, the motion of electrons. That promises to open up fundamental new insights into the mechanisms of chemical reactions, with benefits likely in medicine and biology.

Krausz and his research group at the Vienna University of Technology (VUT) are credited with producing the first attosecond-scale pulse in 2001, with a flash of laser light lasting just 650 attoseconds.

Before that, they had spun off the ultrafast laser company Femtolasers, which has just been acquired by US-based Newport to become part of the firm’s Spectra-Physics laser division.

Since 2001, scientists have worked to further shorten pulse durations, with a University of Central Florida (UCF) research team setting a new world best of 67 attoseconds in September 2012. At the time, UCF researcher Zenghu Chang said that the target was to get below 50 attoseconds, which is thought to be the universal response time for molecular and atomic systems following the removal of an electron.

Researchers from the Laboratory for Attosecond Physics at MPQ and from LMU had previously teamed up with laser physicists at King Saud University, while the European Union is spending hundreds of millions of euros establishing three giant laser facilities in eastern Europe, known collectively as the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) project.

One of those giant facilities, near the University of Szeged in Krausz’s native Hungary, is to focus on the attosecond pulse regime.

Femtolasers is providing a source laser for one of the beamlines at another of the three ELI “pillars” at Prague in the Czech Republic. It is set to produce femtosecond laser pulses with high energies, at an unprecedentedly high repetition rate.

Read more in SPIE Professional about ELI and other big laser facilities in Europe.

• Have a question or comment about this article? Write to us at spieprofessional@spie.org.
• To receive a print copy of SPIE Professional, the SPIE member magazine, become an SPIE member.