Dear colleagues, this week the ITAMP's new postdoctoral fellow, Stefan Pabst, will introduce us to his research. Kind regards, Richard and Swati ITAMP Topical Lunch Discussion Date: Friday, February 13th Time: 12:00-1:30 pm Pizza will be served. Location: B-106 @ Center for Astrophysics (60 Garden Street) Directions: after entering the lobby of the CfA, turn right to enter the hallway of the B building. In the hallway, turn right again, and B-106 is there. Speaker: Stefan Pabst, ITAMP Title: Atomic Many-Body Physics in the Attosecond World Abstract: Ultrafast science is a young, vibrant, and highly interdisciplinary research field combining areas of biology, chemistry, and physics. Attosecond and strong-field physics focus on the electron motion in atoms, molecules, and solid state systems. In this talk, I discuss in more detail the importance of many-body processes in electronic motion as they appear in noble gas atoms when exposed to ultrashort and strong-field pulses. Furthermore, I explain the challenges and the perspectives of many-body theories in the strong-field regime. I show, in particular, how a time-dependent configuration interaction (TDCIS) approach can be applied to uniquely identify collective many-body effects in high-harmonic generation, and to discover an ultrafast decoherence mechanism that entangles the photoelectron with its parent ion within a few hundreds of attoseconds. --------------------------- Dr. Richard Schmidt Institute for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (ITAMP) Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics MS-14 60 Garden St. Cambridge, MA 02138 U.S.A. richard.schmidt(a)cfa.harvard.edu Tel. +1 (617) 496-7610 Fax +1 (617) 496-7668