Wroclaw Tech hosted this year's Nobel Prize winner in physics. Prof. Ferenc Krausz opened the laboratory of the collaborative research group and gave an open lecture. He was listened to by hundreds of people gathered in the university Congress Centre.

The world-renowned Hungarian physicist is director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Munich. In October, together with Prof Anne L'Huillier and Prof Pierre Agostini, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. They were honoured for creating new tools to study the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules.

The visit began with an open lecture entitled 'Attosecond Science: From Speeding Up Electronics to Probing Human Health', to which nearly 600 people listened live.

- This is a truly unique event, as we rarely have the opportunity to host scientists who have just been awarded the Nobel Prize. This lecture, however, was planned much earlier. Originally, Professor Krausz was supposed to appear at our university three years ago, but due to the coronavirus pandemic we had to postpone everything,' Professor Marek Samoć from the Department of Chemistry said before the meeting started. - But a promise is a promise and our guest kept it. Huge credit for this goes to Professor Krzysztof Abramski, whose research group cooperates with our guest and who was very active in making this visit a reality,' he added.

During a lecture organised as part of the Interdisciplinary Scientific Seminar, Prof Ferenc Krausz talked about attosecond-scale light pulses and their application in medicine.

Laser laboratory  

On 7 November, a special research group within the prestigious Max Planck Partner Group programme officially began operations at Wrocław University of  Science andTechnology. Dr Maciej Kowalczyk from the Department of Electronics, Photonics and Microsystems, who collaborated with Prof Krausz on a postdoctoral fellowship in Germany in 2020-22, became head of a team specialising in the construction of ultrafast lasers.

- I would like to thank Prof. Krzysztof Abramski, Prof. Jarosław Sotor and Dr. Maciej Kowalczyk for such a warm welcome, which made me feel at home here, even though this is my first visit to Wrocław," said Prof. Ferenc Krausz. - The opening of this research group is a very prestigious distinction. The whole process of setting it up is very restrictive, and the granting of approval is a guarantee of the highest quality of research. I am very excited about the upcoming collaboration and would like to talk to the team about expanding it before I leave,' he added.

There are currently almost 90 partner groups supported by the Max Planck Society worldwide. Their aim is to promote young scientists in scientifically developing countries.

- "Our task will be to develop topics related to lasers that generate femtosecond laser pulses in the mid-infrared," says Dr Maciej Kowalczyk. - "Our main focus will be on stabilising these laser sources so that they can be used at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics for spectroscopic examination of human blood samples for cancer diagnosis."

Dr Kowalczyk's research group will cooperate directly with the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, which is headed by Prof. Kowalczyk. The Society will provide a grant of EUR 100 000 for the team's activities.

- This money will be used to purchase materials necessary for laboratory work, study trips to the Munich group and, above all, scholarships for students,' enumerates Dr Maciej Kowalczyk and invites male and female students to join his team. - We are still looking for people interested in working on our project, so I encourage anyone interested to get in touch.

During the opening of the laboratory, Prof. Arkadiusz Wójs, rector of Wroclaw Tech, emphasised that as a university we promise to conduct scientific projects at the frontier of cognition and in cooperation with the best international community.

- It is therefore difficult to imagine a better combination than joint projects with Prof. Krausz, who, as can be seen, is an extremely warm leader, with whom young scientists have a chance to develop excellently," said the rector. - It is also important to remember that technical universities should work on solutions that benefit humanity as a whole. Such research, combining physics and medicine, will be conducted in this laboratory, he added.

A simple choice

Dr Maciej Kowalczyk defended his PhD thesis in 2019, written under the supervision of Dr Jarosław Sotor, professor at the Faculty of Electronics, Photonics and Microsystems at our university. He immediately started looking for opportunities to go abroad for a postdoctoral fellowship. - "I wanted to use the experience gained during my PhD in laser construction for a practical and important purpose," - says Dr Kowalczyk.

Prof. Ferenc Krausz's group at the Max Planck Institute in Munich was just starting a project to use a new type of pulsed lasers for cancer diagnosis. Dr Maciej Kowalczyk: - The experiment sounded fascinating, I knew that Prof Krausz's group was one of the best in the world in the field of laser physics, and I was familiar with Munich because I had been there as part of a scholarship from the Erasmus+ programme. So the choice was easy.

During my internship of more than two years, our scientist developed the technology to generate ultra-short laser pulses with a length corresponding to a single oscillation of a light wave in the mid-infrared spectral range.

- 'Our aim was to use this method to assess a patient's health based on laser measurement of a blood sample, primarily for cancer diagnosis,' explains Dr Maciej Kowalczyk. - "Interestingly, the project involves people with very different competences: laser physicists, biologists, specialists in data analysis and artificial intelligence, and even nurses who collect blood from volunteers in thirteen Hungarian blood donation centres," - he adds.

After his return to the Wrocław University of Technology, which enabled him to participate in the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange 'Polish Returns' programme, he continues his research in close collaboration with Prof Ferenc Krausz's group.

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Prof. Ferenc Krausz was the first in the world to generate and measure single pulses of light with a duration on the attosecond scale (one attosecond is 10 -18 s) and is considered the founder of so-called attosecond physics. This experiment makes it possible to observe the movement of electrons inside atoms, which in 2002 was recognized by the scientific journals Nature and Science as one of the most important achievements in science. The measurements have brought new insights into atomic and solid state physics.

The scientist is conducting research to understand microscopic processes involving electrons, atoms and molecules. Ferenc Krausz was born in Mór, Hungary, in 1962, and studied electrical engineering at Budapest University of Technology and theoretical physics at the University of Budapest. He received his doctorate in quantum electronics from Vienna University of Technology in 1991 and his habilitation two years later. Since 2003 he has been director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Munich, where he heads the Attosecond Physics Group, and since 2004 he has been head of the Department of Experimental Physics at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

He is the recipient of many prestigious awards (including 2005 Leibniz Prize, 2006 "Quantum Electronics Award," IEEE Laser and Electro-Optics Society, 2006 British "Progress Medal," 2022 Wolf Prize, 2022 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award). He received the most important award on October 3, 2023. - Nobel Prize in Physics for experimental methods for generating attosecond pulses of light to study the dynamics of electrons in matter. After it was awarded, he declared that he would donate - through his foundation Science4People - the prize money to help Ukraine.

His group's current work involves the use of ultrashort laser pulses in biomedical research. Professor Krausz wants to use the technology to measure femto- and attosecond pulses to spectroscopically analyze blood samples and detect minute changes in their composition. He and his team are investigating whether these changes are specific enough to allow unambiguous diagnosis of diseases - preferably in the early stages. This marks a new era for attosecond physics, as it would be its first practical application and could have a direct impact on people's daily lives.