Visit the lab pushing Nobel work to the next level

"Professor Lou DiMauro, who oversees the day-to-day for the research group he and laureate Pierre Agostini lead, invites you to peek inside. Watch out for the lasers."

From original article in Ohio State Alumni Magazine by Jenny Applegate, with Photos by Jodi Miller.

The article shares a detailed look into the life and experiences of Lou DiMauro, Director of the Institute for Optical Science:

Together, DiMauro and Pierre Agostini run the Ultra-fast Atomic Physics Research Group named for them. In fact, as Ohio State recruited DiMauro from the prestigious Brookhaven National Labs in 2003, he told leaders to consider Agostini, too.

“Even back then, I believed he could win a Nobel,” DiMauro says.

That’s because Agostini’s work helped establish a way to track electrons as they zip around at 1,400 miles per second inside atoms. Electrons are one of the building blocks of atoms; in turn, atoms are the building blocks that make up everything — from your body, to your coffee and the cup it’s in, to stars in space.

Observing things moving so fast requires, essentially, super-short shutter speeds, so Agostini explored light pulses that can be measured in attoseconds. To put a point on how incredible and mind-boggling that is, there are as many attoseconds in one second as there have been seconds since the universe began.

...

“The public thinks of physicists as Albert Einstein and theorists who sit at their desk with paper. But one of the great founders said it best: Physics is really an experimental science,” he says. “It’s the experiment that drives new thought.”

At its most basic, a chunk of what the Agostini-DiMauro group does is shoot lasers into vacuum tubes to reveal how energy and matter work. Physicists call the process harmonics, and the lasers provide the attosecond light pulses. 

The article continues with a detailed view into the Agostini-DiMauro research group, Lou DiMauro's mentorship of students, and their laboratory work.

Read more here: https://alumnimagazine.osu.edu/story/dimauro-agostini-lab

From original article in Ohio State Alumni Magazine by Jenny Applegate, with Photos by Jodi Miller.