IQIM Postdoctoral and Graduate Student Seminar

Special IQIM seminar: April 14 begins at 11 am in 469 Lauritsen.

Abstract: Understanding and manipulating the dynamic behavior of electrons and atomic lattices requires probing matter at its ultimate spatiotemporal and quantum boundaries. This talk presents a unified experimental paradigm for observing and driving physical phenomena at these fundamental limits, bridging advances in attosecond electron microscopy, condensed matter surface science, and ultrafast quantum optics1.

First, we introduce "Attomicroscopy,"2 a breakthrough that shatters previous temporal barriers in transmission electron microscopy to achieve 625-attosecond resolution. Utilizing this instrumentation, we demonstrate real-time, real-space imaging and attosecond electron diffraction of strongly driven electron dynamics in graphene3. Extending this deterministic manipulation to the atomic scale, we explore the field-driven control of hydrogen-bond networks. Using low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy, we reveal the electric-field-induced transition of interfacial water into highly ordered monolayers and characterize the formation of moiré patterns on graphite.

Beyond controlling the structural and electronic states of matter, we extend attosecond precision to the quantum fluctuations of driving optical fields to establish the new fields of ultrafast quantum optics and quantum strong-field physics4. We show that the squeezing of an ultrashort light field is intrinsically time-dependent on sub-optical-cycle timescales, and that this time-domain quantum structure can be visualized and transduced into a quantum electronic observable during strong-field interaction.

Finally, we demonstrate that the quantum optical uncertainty of the driving squeezed field is encoded in the noise statistics of a light-induced tunneling current in a graphene–silicon heterostructure, achieving sub-femtosecond tunability. This constitutes an experimental realization of quantum–quantum coupling between a nonclassical optical field and a quantum electronic observable, establishing a robust foundation for next-generation quantum sensing and ultrafast quantum information processing5.

Refrences

1 Krausz, F. Nobel Lecture: Sub-atomic motions. Rev. Mod. Phys. 96, 030502, (2024).

2 Hui, D., Alqattan, H., Sennary, M., Golubev, N. V. & Hassan, M. T. Attosecond electron microscopy and diffraction. Science Advances 10, eadp5805, (2024).

3 Sennary, M. et al. Light-induced quantum tunnelling current in graphene. Nature Communications 16, 4335, (2025).

4 Sennary, M. et al. Attosecond quantum uncertainty dynamics and ultrafast squeezed light for quantum communication. Light: Science & Applications 14, 350, (2025).

5 Sennary, M., Rivera-Dean, J., Lewenstein, M. & Hassan, M. T. Attosecond quantum optics. arXiv:2601.08671, (2026).