Biography:
Dr. Allan Johnson is a “Ramon y Cajal” Assistant Research Professor at The Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies in Nanoscience (IMDEA Nanoscience), where he is head of the Ultrafast Science of Quantum Materials group. Prior to that he a “La Caixa” Junior Leader at ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Science in Barcelona. He completed his PhD on tabletop attosecond x-ray laser sources at Imperial College London in 2017, where he was a Marie Curie doctoral fellow and NSERC PGS award holder, and his B.Sc. In Physics-Mathematics at the University of Ottawa in 2013. His research interest include ultrafast spectroscopy, quantum materials, and X-ray nano-imaging techniques.

Lecture: "Ultrafast Lasers and Their Applications to (Quantum) Materials"
Modern lasers are capable of producing pulses of light billions and billions of times brighter than the sun but occuring in flash less than a billionth of a billionth of a second. These ultrafast pulses allow us to study the movement of electrons and atoms at their fundamental timescales, but also control and re-shape materials. In these two lectures I will first give an introduction to ultrafast laser sources, spectroscopy and material processing, before focusing on ultrafast spectroscopy and control of quantum materials. Quantum materials, like superconductors or topological insulators, exhibit especially complex properties due to their strong correlations between electrons, nuclei, and spins, and ultrafast spectroscopy has emerged as a unique tool for untangling these correlations.