Didier Queloz

Nobel Prize in Physics 2019
Public lecture: The Exoplanet revolution (in English)
Thursday, May 30, 2024, 7 p.m.
Audimax, TU Dresden

Didier Queloz zu Gast an der TU Dresden 30. Mai 2024

Prof Didier Queloz, FRS, is Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory and part-time professor of physics at ETH- Zurich.
He was born in Switzerland in 1966.
He is at the origin of the ‘exoplanet revolution’ in astrophysics when in 1995 during his PhD with his supervisor they announced the first discovery of a giant planet orbiting another star, outside the solar system. They received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for this spectacular discovery that kick-started the rise of exoplanet researches.
Over the next 25 years, Didier Queloz scientific contributions have been to make progress in detection and measurement of exoplanet systems with the goal to retrieve information on their physical structure to better understand their formation and evolution and to compare with our Solar System. He participated and conducted various programs leading to the detection of hundred planets, include many breakthrough results.
More recently, his activity has focused on the detection of Earth like planets, establishing a comprehensive research program with the goal of making further progress in our understanding of habitability of exoplanets and life in the Universe. He is the funding director of the new Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe at Cambridge and of the new Centre for Origin and Life in the Universe at ETH-Z, Switzerland .
In addition to his research and teaching activities, he participates to numerous documentaries movies, articles TV and radio interviews to share excitement and to promote interest for science in general and particularly topics about exoplanets and life in the Universe.

Public lecture: The Exoplanet revolution

The wealth and diversity of planetary systems that have now been detected modified our perspective on planet formation as a whole and more specifically our place in the Universe. It also  present an opportunity of historical perspectives and an irresistible call to look for signs of life on these new worlds as a way to explore our own origins.  I will introduce the audience with the challenges and recent progresses in this new field of research and will  touch upon the emergence of a new paradigm for the origins of life on Earth. (Didier Queloz)

Anne L'Huillier

Nobel Prize in Physics 2023
Public lecture: Attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics (lecture in English)
Friday, June 28, 2024, 7 p.m.
Audimax, TU Dresden

Anne L'Huillier zu Gast an der TU Dresden: 28. Juni 2024

Anne L'Huillier is a Swedish/French researcher in attosecond science. During the first part of her career, she worked at the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique, in Saclay, France, first as a PhD student until 1986, then as a permanent researcher until 1995. She was postdoc at Chalmers Institute of Technology, Gothenburg. Sweden in 1986, and at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA in 1988. In 1995, she moved to Lund University, Sweden and became full professor in 1997. Her research, both theoretical and experimental, is centered around high-order harmonic generation in gases and its applications, in particular in attosecond science. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 together with Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz for “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”.

Abstract: Attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics

When an intense laser interacts with a gas of atoms, high-order harmonics are generated. In the time domain, this radiation forms a train of extremely short light pulses, of the order of 100 attoseconds. Attosecond pulses allow the study of the dynamics of electrons in atoms and molecules, using pump-probe techniques. This presentation will highlight some of the key steps of the field of attosecond science.

Reinhard Genzel

Nobel Prize in Physics 2020
Public lecture: Galaxien und Schwarze Löcher (lecture held in German, "Galaxies and black holes")
Wednesday, October 23, 2024, 7 p.m.
Audimax, TU Dresden

Reinhardt Genzel zu Gast an der TU Dresden: 23. Oktober 2024

Prof. Dr. Reinhard Genzel is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and Professor at the Graduate School for Physics and Astronomy at the University of California in Berkeley. He is one of the world's leading researchers in the field of infrared and submillimeter astronomy. His research focuses on experimental astrophysics, black holes, galactic nuclei, galaxy evolution, star formation and extragalactic astrophysics. In 2020, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with the US astronomer Andrea Ghez, for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

Galaxien und Schwarze Löcher (Galaxies and black holes)

At the center of the Milky Way sits an extraordinarily compact object that astronomers call Sagittarius A*. Based on the predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity, it has been suspected for 50 years that SgrA* could be a supermassive black hole. To investigate this hypothesis, Reinhard Genzel and his team have been on the trail of this mass monster for forty years. Using high-precision measurements of stellar motions around SgrA* and of bursts of hot gas from the immediate vicinity of SgrA*, Genzel and a second group led by Andrea Ghez in California have convincingly shown that SgrA* really must be a black hole with a mass of 4 million solar masses. It is now even possible to measure characteristic effects of the general theory of relativity, such as the gravitational redshift of light or the orbital precession of a passing star, for the first time in such an extreme environment. At the same time, it has become clear that most galaxies are home to massive black holes and that these black holes must have formed around a billion years after the Big Bang. Together with Roger Penrose and Andrea Ghez, Reinhard Genzel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020.