Ferenc Krausz: The man behind the Nobel Prize winner

He was able to produce extremely short flashes of light, which made it possible for the first time to make the ultra-fast movements of electrons visible.

The newly crowned Nobel Prize winner was very surprised by the news of the award. “I’m trying to realize that this is reality and not a dream,” Krausz told the German Press Agency on Tuesday shortly after the award was announced. He didn’t expect that. Krausz conducts research as a director at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching near Munich and at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich.

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With his research, together with many scientists and teams, he managed to “follow in real time the fastest processes that exist in nature outside the atomic nucleus, namely the movement of electrons,” said Krausz at the Max Planck Institute. which just had an open day. “These movements initiate all molecular processes in living organisms and are ultimately responsible for the development of diseases at the most fundamental level.” Findings in this area could therefore be important for medicine.

There has been a large research project involving 10,000 people for three years to detect diseases such as cancer in the early stages. They regularly have blood samples taken that are examined with infrared laser light – in order to “gain further information that laboratory medicine cannot currently provide us about diseases that may develop at an earlier stage.” The initial results are promising, but it will probably take another five to ten years before application.

Krausz likes to spend his “sparse” free time doing sports and reading, as well as spending time with his family. He is married and has two adult daughters. “You always have to try to find a balance somehow. Leisure time is a scarce commodity when you’re working in research,” he told the dpa.

Krausz, born on May 17, 1962 in Mor (Hungary), studied theoretical physics at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and electrical engineering at the Technical University of Budapest from 1981 to 1985 – he completed the latter studies with a diploma in 1985. He then moved to the TU Vienna, where he received his doctorate in quantum electronics in 1991. Krausz stayed at the TU Vienna, completed his habilitation there in 1993 and became a full professor in 1999. The FWF Science Fund awarded him the Start Prize in 1996 and the Wittgenstein Prize in 2002, the most valuable scientific award in Austria.

Research at the TU Vienna successful

In 2001, Ferenc Krausz and his team at the Vienna University of Technology succeeded for the first time in generating and measuring individual flashes of light in the attosecond range from extreme ultraviolet light. An attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second (0,000,000,000,000,000,001 seconds). These extremely short flashes of light made it possible for the first time to make the ultra-fast movements of electrons visible. Since then, Krausz has been able to record numerous real-time films of the movement of electrons in molecules and atoms.

The physicist is therefore considered one of the founders of attosecond physics. On the basis of his research, new areas of work emerged, such as high-resolution microscopy, which also enables the examination of living organisms. He has also developed lasers for diagnosing eye and cancer diseases.

Director at the Max Planck Institute

In 2003 he was appointed director at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching. Since 2004 he has been a professor of physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich. In the same year he was elected a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). In 2015 he founded the Center for Advanced Laser Applications (CALA) at the LMU and has headed it since then. Since 2019, Krausz has also been co-founder and director of the Center for Molecular Fingerprinting Research in Budapest.

Krausz still works as an honorary professor at the TU Vienna and still works with the Viennese groups. Just two weeks ago he was a guest at a symposium at the TU Vienna.

The information group Thomson Reuters already listed Krausz as one of the favorites for the Nobel Prize in Physics in its annual forecast in 2015. Last year he was awarded the prestigious Wolf Prize in Physics together with his co-Nobel Prize winner Anne L’Huillier from the University of Lund (Sweden) and with Paul Corkum from the University of Ottawa (Canada) for his contributions to attosecond physics.

“Each of them made crucial contributions, both to the technical development of attosecond physics and to its application to fundamental physical studies,” said the award-awarding Wolf Foundation in Israel. Krausz saw the award as “an appreciation of the future prospects that ultrashort pulse laser research offers for pushing the boundaries of science and technology.”

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