Mauro Fanciulli gets the Physics Doctoral Thesis Award

© H. Dil / 2018 EPFL
Mauro Fanciulli got the award for his thesis entitled ‘Spin polarization and attosecond time delay in photoemission from solids’ supervised by Prof. Hugo Dil, professeur boursier SNSF.
In his thesis work, Mauro Fanciulli developed and applied a novel approach to determine the attosecond time scale of the photoemission process from the measured spin polarisation. In contrast to other approaches in the time domain, the unique combination of theory and experiment employed by Mauro allows to extract the absolute, and not only relative, time delay. Furthermore, the method does not require ultrashort photon pulses or an external reference time and as such allows to “measure time without a clock”. Mauro applied his method to plain copper and to the high temperature superconductor BSCCO, which yielded time scales of 26 and 85 attoseconds respectively, indicating the possible influence of correlation effects on the process. The developed method can also be applied to other physical processes relying on the transition from an initial to a final state, such as tunneling. In a broader context Mauro’s results open up a new research direction and yield a thrilling new insight in the fundamental time scale of quantum mechanical processes.
The Doctoral School has also recognized the following doctorates with a special distinction: Nikolay Bykovskiy, Doccio Malinverni and Anna Teplukhina.