Carey Foster Prize for Tahir Shaaran

Tahir Shaaran has just been awarded the CAREY FOSTER PRIZE for Outstanding Postgraduate Research Physics AMOPP. Tahir's PhD work, on theoretical strong-field and attosecond physics, was developed from 2007 to the end of

2010, under the supervision of Dr Carla Faria. Tahir studied different scattering mechanisms in laser-induced nonsequential double ionization (NSDI) of atoms and diatomic molecules. Such studies were performed using mainly analytic methods.

His thesis, entitled " A rigorous treatment of excitation and quantum interference in laser-induced nonsequential double ionization in atoms and molecules" led to four high-quality publications, and constitutes the most comprehensive analytic studies worldwide of excitation and electron-electron correlation in NSDI. Tahir and Carla provide a unique interpretation of this phenomenon, which is increasinlgy gaining recognition from the international strong-field and attosecond community. Their predictions have been recently identified in experiments at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Munich (Matthias Kling, private communication, July 2011), which consttuted a milestone in the understanding of such processes.

For more details on this and related work see:

http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucapcfi/