HYBRID: Making the invisible visible with an atomic quantum microscope: using electrons to see atoms move in real-time!

This lecture will be held in presence in the Anna-von-Helmholtz-Bau of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Berlin-Charlottenburg and can be followed online at the same time. Please use the links above to register your personal participation or to receive the access data for online participation.

Topic:

Since Thomas Young’s 1801 double-slit experiment, interference has revealed the wave nature of light; more than a century later, electron diffraction earned the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing that electrons behave as waves too. Ahmed Zewail’s 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry then showed how femtosecond laser pulses can capture motion during chemical reactions. In this talk, I will show how ultrafast electron diffraction brings these ideas together: femtosecond light pulses create femtosecond electron pulses which interact with samples; their scattering reveals interference patterns from which we reconstruct atomic motion. This lets us produce "movies" of ultrafast structural changes in gases, liquids, and solids, and understand the light-driven structure-function relationship in materials.

CV:

Kasra Amini received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2017 for work on laser-induced Coulomb explosion imaging and subsequently carried out postdoctoral research on laser-induced electron diffraction at ICFO. Since 2021 he has led the Ultrafast Electron Diffraction group at the Max Born Institute in Berlin developing high-repetition-rate electron scattering methods to image transient structural dynamics in gases and condensed matter with high temporal resolution. In 2024 he received the ERC Starting Grant TERES (Time- and Energy-Resolved Electron Scattering) and was named by Tagesspiegel among Berlin’s top 100 scientists. Kasra is an avid Manchester United fan, and believes England will win the World Cup this year.

Following the lecture, there will be a get-together where participants can exchange ideas with each other over pizza and drinks.

The event is sponsored by the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation.