A life in context
The person behind the prize
Krausz studied in Hungary before developing his research in Austria and Germany. He specialises in making and measuring extremely short laser pulses. His work connects the craft of building precise light sources with the question of how electrons respond when matter is disturbed.
The contribution
In 2001, his group isolated a single pulse lasting about 650 attoseconds. A single flash, rather than a repeating train, made it possible to time an individual ultrafast event.
The idea in plain language
Electrons rearrange far faster than atoms move. To measure that motion, an instrument needs an exceptionally short time window. An attosecond is one quintillionth of a second: 10⁻¹⁸ seconds.
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