Learning Outcomes
The student will learn the fundamentals of the highly nonlinear atomic and molecular response to intense light and the new physical processes that emerge, such as optical tunneling, high harmonic generation, highly efficient energy absorption by atoms and molecules, the application of strong laser fields to imaging molecular structures and dynamics.
Through lectures, extensive hands-on exercises and projects the students will learn both the key physical concepts and theoretical tools including time-dependent quantum mechanics and wavepacket dynamics, Keldysh theory and strong-field S-matrix methods, time-dependent semiclassical methods and quantum trajectories, Kramers-Henneberger approach, methods for the numerical solution of the time-dependent Schroedinger equation in strong laser fields, and the applications of quantum chemistry methods to time-dependent molecular response including non-Hermitian quantum mechanics.
At the end of the course, the students will be able to competently apply the above theoretical tools to analyse and design the experiments aimed at imaging electron dynamics in atoms and molecules.