Sculpting light in space and time at the attosecond timescale
Carlos Hernández-García
Associate Professor
Universidad de Salamanca (Spain)
Presented as part of the X-lites Virtual Seminar Series, leading up to the 2026 Structured-Light Incubator
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Abstract: Attosecond science is entering an exciting phase, where tailoring spatially the properties of light—its amplitude, phase, and polarization state—enables the generation of structured attosecond pulses with unprecedented control. These advances open powerful opportunities not only for probing chiral systems and magnetic materials with spatial resolution, but also for engineering the temporal and spectral structure of the pulses themselves. In this talk, we review how to structure attosecond light pulses via high-order harmonic generation. We shall emphasize how light topological properties—related to spin, orbital angular momentum, and more exotic vectorial features—can be imprinted onto extreme-ultraviolet and soft X-ray pulses. We will discuss how these spatial degrees of freedom can also serve to tune temporal and spectral characteristics, ultimately enabling new kinds of spatiotemporal attosecond light states. Very recent developments on imprinting topological structures that intertwine space and time in attosecond pulses will also be presented, including the generation of attosecond spatio temporal optical vortices (STOVs) and attosecond skyrmion pulses.
About the Speaker:
Carlos Hernández-García is an Associate Professor at Universidad de Salamanca (Spain), Director of the Research Center on Structured Light and Matter (LUMES), ERC fellow. He received his PhD in Physics in 2013. After a European Marie Sklodowska Curie postdoctoral stay at JILA, University of Colorado at Boulder, he returned to Universidad de Salamanca where he works on the generation and applications of ultrafast structured laser pulses, merging structured light and attosecond science. Together with his colleagues and collaborators, he has designed theoretical tools to understand and combine quantum simulations with highly non-linear strong-field processes. Recipient of the Fresnel Prize 2019, the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize 2021, and the ICO Prize 2023.
Time: Monday, January 26th 2025 at 10:00AM Eastern
Location: Zoom, Register here
- This event is open to the public - Registration is free -
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The Extreme Light in Intensity, Time, and Space (X-lites) network promotes collaboration around the world to make use of new extreme light facilities.
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