The Advanced Grant of the European Research Council is one of – if not the - most prestigious and highly competitive research grants in Europe. It is awarded to established scientists with a significant track record and impact in their respective field of research.
Professor Eleftherios Goulielmakis is best known for his work in the field of ultrafast physics, in the attosecond range. An attosecond is one billionth of a billionth of a second. Early in his career, Goulielmakis was able to directly measure the electric field of light waves for the first time with the „attosecond streaking” technique. Today, using the technique of light-field synthesis, his group creates and exploits optical attosecond pulses –to conduct research at the frontiers of ultrafast microscopy, known as picoscopy.
Goulielmakis’ project, entitled “Ultrafast Picoscopy of Solids”, is one of 218 scientific projects selected for funding by the European Research Council this year. The €2.5 million grant will foster Goulielmakis and his team’s high-risk, high gain research at the interface of ultrafast science and microscopy.
“I am thrilled by this fantastic news, and grateful to the ERC for selecting our project for this grant” says Goulielmakis. “With the help of this grant, we plan to pursue research at the University of Rostock towards the detailed visualization of atomic and electron motion in ordinary and correlated materials”, he adds. “We anticipate the technique and the results of this endeavour to yield benefits to a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines – from physics and quantum chemistry to material science and information technology” he concludes.
Goulielmakis has been a professor of physics at the University of Rostock since 2018. As of 2023, he has also served as an external member of the governance council of the University of Ioannina, Greece. From 2010 to 2018, he led a research group on attosecond electronics at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum optics in Garching, Germany.
Prior to receiving the ERC Advanced Grant, Professor Goulielmakis had been awarded the Georgios Foteinos Prize of the Academy of Athens in 2007, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Young Scientist Prize in Optics of the International Commission for Optics in 2009, the Gustav Hertz Prize of the German Physical Society (DPG) in 2013, and the Röntgen Prize of the Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen, Germany, in 2015.
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Eleftherios Goulielmakis
University of Rostock
Institute for Physics
Extreme Photonics Laboratory
Tel.: +49 381 498-6800
e.goulielmakis@uni-rostock.de