Jens Biegert

Jens Biegert is a German physicist and professor of attosecond physics and ultrafast optics at ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences, adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico, and guest professor at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society.

Biegert is a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, and Optica.

Education
Biegert received his Bachelor of Science from the University of Würzburg, Master of Science in Physics from the University of New Mexico, and PhD from the Technical University Munich.

With an interest in astronomy and an exchange program with the United States, Biegert enrolled at the University of Würzburg. He participated in the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Foreign Exchange Fellowship with the University of New Mexico from 1995 to 1996.

After the fellowship, Biegert returned to Germany and received a PhD from the Technical University of Munich in 2001. Biegert studied the coherent excitation of sodium during his PhD.

Research and career
Biegert is the head of the Attoscience and Ultrafast Optics group at ICFO, Barcelona, Spain. His research includes studying the behavior of the quantum world within atoms, molecules and solids.

In 2016, Biegert's research team at ICFO, in collaboration with Kansas State University, achieved, for the first time, the spatial and temporal resolution required to take snapshots of molecular dynamics. In 2019, his team built on this work and observed the structural bending and stretching of carbon disulfide (CS2). They were able to directly image the phenomenon in real-time to observe a CS2 molecule stretch and bend. Biegert's team reported that the ultrafast modifications in the CS2 molecule's structure are driven by changes in its electronic structure, specifically the Renner-Teller effect.

Selected publications