On September 30, 2014, Prof. Franz X. Kartner paid a visit to SIOM and gave high-level seminar at SIOM. Prof. Ruxin Li, Director of SIOM presided over his seminar.

Prof. Franz X. Kartner delivered a presentation entitled by “Sub-Cycle Optical Waveform Synthesis and Controlled Electron Emission”. He reviewed that many strong-field processes greatly benefit from the availability of single-cycle to sub-cycle optical pulses ranging from the generation of intense isolated attosecond XUV pulses, to in vacuum laser-driven electron acceleration and strong field photo emission. He also presented a scalable approach to a multi-mJ, more than 2-octave wide optical waveform synthesizer covering the wavelength range from 0.5 - 2.5 m using parametric amplification. Key to energy-scalable synthesis are (i) broadband carrier-envelope phase (CEP) stable continuum generation, that can serve as a seed for the synthesizer; (ii) a powerful and energetic fs or ps-pump laser technology for powering the multi-channel OPAs or OPCPAs that amplify the seed radiation to the desired energy level; (iii) two-octave spanning dichroic dispersion compensating mirrors to split and recombine spectral ranges without introducing phase distortions that cannot be compensated for; (iv) broadband optical parametric amplification channels and (v) a device to stabilize the relative timing and phase of the individually amplified wavelength channels, i.e., to execute the waveform synthesis.

Franz X. Kartner received his Diploma and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Technical University Munich in 1986 and 1989, respectively and a Habilitation degree in Experimental Physics at ETH-Zürich in1997. After faculty positions at University of Karlsruhe (TH) and MIT, he joined in 2011 the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) at DESY, and is Professor of Physics at University of Hamburg, and Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research is focused on few-cycle and ultralow jitter femtosecond lasers for optical metrology, attosecond science and compact x-ray sources. He is a fellow of the IEEE and OSA.