Experimental Physicist Marcus Ossiander Awarded START Prize 2022

At the Institute of Experimental Physics at TU Graz, Marcus Ossiander wants to realise a microscope that can be used to measure extremely small and ultra-fast processes, such as how a photon is absorbed by an atom. Image source: FWF - Sabine Hoffmann By Christoph Pelzl - With the Austrian Science Fund's (FWF) science prize endowed with 1.2 million euros, the researcher at TU Graz is designing new nano-optics with the aim of building a microscope that can measure ultra-short chemical reactions with extreme precision. Additional at the end of the text Marcus Ossiander (born 1989 in Munich, Germany) wrote his doctoral thesis at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and obtained his PhD in ultrafast physics under Reinhard Kienberger at the TU Munich. He has been conducting research on meta-optics at Harvard University since 2020. He is carrying out the START project at the Institute of Experimental Physics at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), where he wants to build a microscope in the next few years of research that can be used to observe physical processes in the attosecond range. An attosecond is a trillionth of a second and " is to a second what a second is to the age of the universe ", as Ossiander explains in the interview with the Austrian Science Fund , going on to say that this opens up new applications for attosecond physics: "We can use it to study solar cells, improve catalysis and other chemical reactions, or even analyse how fast digital communication can be in the first place." - At the Institute of Experimental Physics at TU Graz, Marcus Ossiander wants to realise a microscope that can be used to measure extremely small and ultra-fast processes, such as how a photon is absorbed by an atom.