(Picture Credit: Tim Kramer, RUB) 

Clara Saraceno

Full Professor at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany

High-power ultrafast moves into the Terahertz

Ultrafast laser-driven broadband Terahertz light sources are nowadays ubiquitous tools in many scientific fields, enabling researchers to control and probe an immense variety of low energy phenomena in condensed matter and other systems. They are also being increasingly deployed in industrial settings for inspection and non destructive testing: THz waves "see through" optically opaque objects, and can provide rich spectroscopic information at a glance. While techniques to generate short, broadband THz pulses using ultrafast laser pulses and nonlinear conversion techniques have seen continuous performance progress in the last few years, their average power has traditionally moved comparatively slowly, which has prevented many of these fields from blooming. On the other hand, the increasing availability and enormous performance progress of ultrafast Ytterbium-based lasers providing multi-100-W to kilowatt average-power levels has opened up the area of high average power, laser-driven THz sources: recent results reaching average power levels in the THz domain approaching the watt-level, opening the door to a multiplicity of new and old research areas to be re-visited. We review recent progress in the generation of high-average power THz-pulses, current technological challenges in scaling THz average power, and applications areas that could potentially benefit from these novel sources.

About the Speaker

Clara Saraceno is a full professor at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. She was born in 1983 in Argentina. In 2007 she completed a Diploma in Engineering and an MSc at the Institut d’Optique Graduate School, Paris France. She first worked as an engineering trainee at Coherent Inc. Santa Clara, California, until 2008. She then completed a PhD in Physics at ETH Zürich in 2012 where she carried out research on high-power ultrafast disk lasers. From 2013-2014, she worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Neuchatel and ETH Zürich, Switzerland, where she worked on high-flux XUV generation via high harmonics generation. In 2016, she received a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and became Associate Professor of Photonics and Ultrafast Science in the Electrical Engineering Faculty at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, followed by a full professorship in the same university since 2020. 
Prof. Saraceno’s research interests are in the development of high-power ultrafast laser systems and their application in driving secondary sources via nonlinear optics. One of her current main research areas is THz technology and spectroscopy, where her group aims to achieve high average power level broadband THz radiation.
She has received a number of prizes and awards including the ETH Medal for Outstanding PhD thesis (2013), the European Physical Society Quantum Electronics and Optics Division PhD prize in applied aspects (2013), the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt (2016), an ERC Starting Grant (2018), the SPIE Harold E. Edgerton Award for High-speed Optics (2024) and an ERC Consolidator Grant (2024). She was elected Fellow of Optica (formerly the Optical Society) in the 2022 class.

LinkedIn: Clara Saraceno