Watch the 2025 Plenary Sessions
Plenary Speakers
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Professor Clara Saraceno
Head Chair of Photonics and Ultrafast Laser Science, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
Terahertz light is becoming a ubiquitous tool in many scientific fields and is also increasingly deployed in industrial settings, in inspection, non destructive testing and other security applications. Terahertz wave "see through" optically opaque objects, and can provide rich spectroscopic information. In science, they can excite and probe a plethora of low energy phenomena in condensed matter. While these systems have seen tremendous progress in last decades, efficient, and lab-based THz generation methods combining ultra-broad broad bandwidth and high dynamic range (e.g., as provided by high THz average power and correspondingly high repetition rate) remain very rare, and most measurements remain too slow, which limits their wide applicability. In recent years, an emerging research area has gained speed: increase the average power pf broadband THz sources using state-of-the-art, high-average power ultrafast Yb-gain based lasers providing multi-100-W to kilowatt average-power levels as excitation sources. Recent results have allowed to reach power levels in the THz domain in the multi-ten to multi-hundred milliwatts in different repetition rate regions – which was previously restricted to accelerator -type THz sources. This progress opens the door to a multiplicity of new and old research areas to be re-visited. In this talk, we review recent progress in the generation of high-average power THz-TDS. We will present the state-of-the-art of high-power ultrafast laser sources with potential for driving THz sources, current technological challenges in scaling THz average power, and applications areas that could potentially benefit from these novel sources.
Clara Saraceno was born in Argentina in 1983. She completed a dual degree program in France and earned her doctorate in physics from ETH Zurich in 2012. After a postdoctoral stay at ETH Zurich and University of Neuchatel she received the Sofja Kovalevskaja Prize from the AvH (2015) and started the Photonics and Ultrafast Laser Science Group as Associate Professor in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Ruhr University Bochum. In 2018, she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant followed in 2024 by a Consolidator Grant. She is a Fellow of Optica since 2022. Prof. Saraceno is now a full professor at RUB and her current research interest spans from Laser technology to Terahertz technology, laser-plasma interactions among others.
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Professor Alexander Gaeta
David M. Rickey Professor of Applied Physics at Columbia University, USA, United States