Since the invention of the laser, our ability to control and utilize the rich properties of light has grown steadily. With advanced light comes the opportunity to steer and probe electrons in matter with commensurate precision. In coherent control, a phase-related property of one or more optical pulses is used adjust the final state that electrons occupy once the optical pulses have subsided. In this webinar, Shawn Sederberg will present results from two different domains of coherent control.

In the first, Dr. Sederberg will demonstrate that when a single-cycle optical pulse is applied to a dielectric, the creation of electron-hole pairs through strong-field transitions can be largely confined in time to a sub-femtosecond scale. We develop and benchmark a technique that harnesses this rapid change in electrical properties for the purpose of measuring electric field waveforms of pulses with wavelengths ranging from 275 nm to 5.3 microns. This technique, nonlinear photoconductive sampling, is then applied to attosecond spectroscopy in ambient lab conditions.

Subsequently, Dr. Sederberg will show that the spatial structure of optical pulses can be transferred to the spatial arrangement of currents in a medium through coherent control. By applying cylindrical vector beams and beams with phase structure to coherent control, we demonstrate the possibility to produce strong, femtosecond-duration magnetic fields that are spatially isolated from their electric field counterparts.

What You Will Learn:

• The basic concept of coherent control or quantum control
• How strong-field current injection can be used to measure optical field waveforms
• How optically-injected currents can be spatially sculpted using structured light

Who Should Attend:

• Graduate students working in the area of ultrafast optics
• Any researcher or professor working in the area of ultrafast optics

About the Presenter: Shawn Sederberg from Simon Fraser University

Shawn Sederberg completed his Ph. D. at the University of Alberta in 2014 and received the Governor General's Gold Medal in recognition of his top academic achievement. Subsequently, he was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, where he worked on attosecond spectroscopy in solid-state systems. In 2017, he joined the Joint Attosecond Science Laboratory in Ottawa, Canada as a Research Associate. There, he combined tools and techniques from the structured light and ultrafast optics communities to demonstrate the potential for an optical source of strong and brief magnetic fields. Since 2021, he has been an Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering Science at Simon Fraser University in Metro Vancouver, Canada. The early stages of his research program will explore aspects of attosecond spectroscopy, quantum control, magnetism, and emerging materials.