Otto Hahn Medal for Amelie Heinzerling

The Max Planck Society annually awards the Otto Hahn Medal to up to 30 early-career scientists for outstanding achievements in their doctoral research.

Amelie Heinzerling has been awarded the prestigious Otto Hahn Medal from the Max Planck Society for her groundbreaking contribution to ultrafast optics and attosecond science. She received the medal at the Max Planck Society’s Annual Meeting in Frankfurt am Main.

In her thesis, titled “Field-Resolved Single-Cycle Deep-UV Pulses via Attosecond Solitons”, Amelie demonstrated a new source of attosecond pulses, which extends into a new spectral range: the deep ultraviolet. Using soliton dynamics in a gas-filled hollow-core fiber, she successfully compressed pulses to the sub-femtosecond duration. To verify this unprecedented duration of the pulses, Amelie also had to extend electric field metrology into the deep ultraviolet, demonstrating that nonlinear photoconductive sampling can accurately measure the electric field of such pulses. Her work, published in Nature Photonics last year, has already attracted intense interest and opens a wide new range of possibilities for the field, particularily for studying the dynamics of valence electrons.

Extending attosecond pulses into a new territory where the necessary metrology was not yet demonstrated required a great deal of innovative spirit and technical aptitude. Well deserved, Amelie!