La Faculté des Sciences, l'Unité de Recherche Molsys et le Département de Chimie ont le plaisir de vous inviter à la conférence du Professeur Fernando Martín García (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) intitulée "Open questions in Attosecond Chemistry".
Infos pratiques
Galerie des Arts, bât. B7b, amphi. 142
19 mai 2025, 11h30
Un café de bienvenue sera offert dès 11h00 aux participant·es qui auront l'occasion d'y rencontrer l'oratrice.
Pour la bonne organisation de l'événement, merci de vous y inscrire pour le 15 mai 2026 au plus tard.
Fernando Martín García est professeur à l'Université autonome de Madrid et membre de l'Instituto Madrileño de Estudios Avanzados en Nanociencia (IMDEA-Nano). Il reconnu comme le fondateur des bases théoriques de l'attochimie, discipline consistant à rendre visibles les mouvements des particules subatomiques (électrons et noyaux) afin de les modifier, à l'aide d'impulsions lumineuses extrêmement brèves, mesurables en attosecondes (impulsions laser ultra-rapides, d'une durée d'à peine un trillionième de seconde). Pour cette contribution scientifique majeure, il a reçu en 2017 le Prix Rey Jaime I dans la catégorie de la recherche fondamentale. En 2000, il a reçu le Prix national de la recherche Rey Juan Carlos I, en 2010, le prix de la Société royale espagnole de chimie dans le domaine de la physique chimique et, en 2011, la bourse « Advanced Grant » du Conseil européen de la recherche (XCHEM).
With the advent of attosecond light pulses at the dawn of the twenty first century, access to the time scale of electronic motion, i.e., the ultimate time scale responsible for chemical transformations, was finally at our reach. Since the first attosecond pump-probe experiments performed in molecules [1,2], the field has grown exponentially, leading to the new discipline of attochemistry [3]. As a result, it is nowadays possible to follow in real time the motion of the “fast” electronic motion in molecules, mostly in the gas phase, and understand how this motion affects the “slower” motion of atomic nuclei and vice versa. There are, however, new scenarios [4] that will allow one to extend the range of applications to more complex molecular systems [5], including the condensed phase, and to overcome some of the limitations of current attosecond technologies, such as the low intensity of attosecond pulses produced by high harmonic generation, the impossibility to generate such pulses in the visible and UV spectral regions, or the difficulties to combine them with truly imaging methods for direct time-resolved observations of the electron density without the need for reconstruction from measured photoelectron, photoion or transient absorption spectra. Furthermore, irradiation of molecules with attosecond pulses may also open new scenarios for quantum information technologies [6], thus bringing chemistry to one of the most active research activities in recent years.
In this talk, I will describe some of the new theoretical developments aiming at supporting ongoing experimental efforts along the above-mentioned directions, thus illustrating the high potential of attochemistry to uncover new phenomena in chemistry and the need for such theoretical developments to guide the experimental efforts.
The 23rd Symposium of the International Association for Cyanophyte/Cyanobacteria (IAC) Research will be held from 3-8 August 2026 at the University of Liège in Liège, Belgium.
