Ferenc Krausz

Ferenc Krausz (born May 17, 1962, Mór, Hungary) is a Hungarian-born Austrian physicist who was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for his experiments with attosecond pulses of light. He shared the prize with French physicists Pierre Agostini and Anne L’Huillier. An attosecond is 10⁻¹⁸ second, or one billionth of a billionth of a second. When electrons move in atoms and molecules, they move on attosecond timescales. By generating pulses of light that last tens or hundreds of attoseconds, scientists can study the movements of electrons.

Krausz studied theoretical physics as an undergraduate at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He received a diploma with distinction in electrical engineering in 1985 from Budapest University of Technology. Krausz enrolled in the Vienna University of Technology in 1988, earning with distinction a doctorate in laser physics in 1991 and a postdoctoral habilitation degree in 1993.

Krausz remained at the Vienna University of Technology and joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1996, rising to the rank of full professor in 1999. He has served as the director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the chair of the Department of Experimental Physics and Laser Physics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Munich since 2004. Krausz became the founding director of the International Max Planck Research School of Advanced Photon Science and cofounder of the Munich-Centre for Advanced Photonics (MAP) in 2006, serving as the latter’s director between 2010 and 2019. He founded the Centre for Advanced Laser Applications in Munich in 2015 and cofounded the Center for Molecular Fingerprinting in Budapest in 2019.

In the 1980s and ’90s L’Huillier and collaborators showed that when an infrared laser was fired through a highly ionized noble gas, the higher harmonics of the laser beam (that is, light with a frequency that is an integer multiple of that of the initial laser beam) would not decrease in intensity. This phenomenon is called high-harmonic generation (HHG). Once L’Huillier and her collaborators explained why HHG happened, they were able to show that such high harmonics could be added together to form light pulses tens or hundreds of attoseconds long.

Krausz and his group were among the first to generate attosecond pulses and published their results in 2001. They were able to produce isolated pulses, each lasting 650 attoseconds. (Agostini and his group were working independently at the same time and produced trains of 250-attosecond pulses.)

Krausz is a member of the Austrian, Hungarian, Russian, and European academies of science. He became an elected fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA, now Optica) in 2009 for his work pioneering investigations into and direct experiments on the motion of electrons. He was the recipient of the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary in 2012, the King Faisal International Prize for Science in 2013, and the Vladilen Letokhov Medal from the European Physical Society and the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2019. Krausz is the author of Electrons in Motion: Attosecond Physics Explores Fastest Dynamics (2019).