On 16 May, the International Day of Light, the world remembers that it was on this day in 1960 that American physicist and engineer Theodore Maiman demonstrated the first working laser. To mark the event, our research institute once again organized an open day, with a special focus on quantum science, which was born 100 years ago in 1925 with the publication of related discoveries.
Szabolcs Hack, our research fellow, gave talks about the past, present and future of quantum physics. He pointed out that quantum discoveries are used in imaging and LED technologies, optical networks, modern communication systems, and of course lasers too apply quantum-based principles.
In the “Solve the Quantum Puzzle!” game, visitors had to match the prominent figures of quantum physics with the most important results that can be associated with them. The key to the solution was the “particles” – fitness balls – of different sizes and colours placed in the reception area. Those giving correct answers gained entry to the Institute’s restricted access areas and could get insight into research going on in the laboratories.
One of the (guest) experimenters at our event was Ferenc Ignácz, a master teacher at the Institute of Physics, University of Szeged. At the end of each month, the physicist, who graduated in 1989, holds thematic lectures entitled KísérletEST (evening of experiments) to an audience of 150 to 180 in the Institute’s Budó Ágoston Lecture Hall. But not only there. In addition to Szeged schools, over the past three years he has enchanted students in several schools in Bács-Kiskun, Csongrád-Csanád and Békés counties with his one-and-a-half to two-hour demonstrations.
“I believe that we can make physics appealing to young people through experiments. It is spectacular, colourful, smelly, sparkly, smouldering demonstrations that spark their interest. However, real breakthroughs can only be achieved if young people can experiment themselves, under the supervision of a teacher. They can gain fantastic experience by seeing and doing.
“I hear from physics teachers that many students come to secondary school with an inherent aversion to the subject. Having lost interest in physics in primary school, they just want to be left alone. This shows that the upper primary school years are crucial. If you can get children to like physics in those years, you just have to maintain their interest in secondary school. However, if they develop an aversion to it during the upper primary years, it is very difficult to reverse the process,” said Ferenc Ignácz, who has seen 2,000 to 2,500 students experimenting live annually in recent years. The master teacher who – apart from other experiments – wrote in liquid with laser light at our Day of Light event, feels the world is becoming more and more plastic-dominated. Young people are fidgeting with gadgets, but they don’t know what a spring is, for example. They lack physical stimulation and personal experience. The physicist, a keen advocate of popular science, is motivated by the fact that many people have turned to physics after seeing his lectures. Such feedback encourages him to keep working. This poses no difficulty for him, because he loves experiments.
Éva Eszter Székács, a year 10 student of Deák Ferenc Secondary Grammar School in Szeged, came to our institute with three of her classmates. She was in part motivated by the “A” promised by her physics teacher, and in part by the fact that as an aspiring medical school student, she will start taking extra physics lessons at school from the autumn. She is not the first in the family to be interested in our institute. Her grandfather visited us earlier with his cousin and told her many interesting stories about that visit. The students from Deák Grammar School saw thought-provoking experiments and exciting demonstrations. They are fascinated by the experiments they see in physics lessons, but ours sparked their interest even more.
I met Szilvia Szebeni-Gyebrovszki at the stand of freezing experiments. She was delighted to see the fascination of her seven-year-old twin sons and their 12-year-old big brother by the demonstration with liquid nitrogen. She says the two younger ones are driven by natural curiosity; they are interested in everything. Their year 5 brother is learning about the world in science classes, but they do not have separate physics, chemistry and biology lessons yet.
This was the fifth open-day event of ELI ALPS that this family had attended in the last three years. They are regular visitors because the experiments bring different phenomena into tangible proximity. What thrills them is sensory experience. Szilvia and her husband think it is important to show their children that science is a potential career path. She also recommended our events to others.
As part of the programme, we organized a science T-shirt competition. Our guests could enter with T-shirts bought from shops, received in camps, or designed and made at home. Mátyás Ádám from Budapest chose the latter solution. His black T-shirt featured a vintage Edison bulb in the middle with colourful figures and captions around it. He says that the design was created with the help of artificial intelligence, but the end-result was not quite what he had hoped for. (The idea was recognized with the third prize in the competition.)
Elizabet Kovács was drawn to physics already as a young child. When she was in primary school, she repeatedly borrowed from the library the same book on black holes and stars from the “What’s what” (“Mi micsoda”) series. Her curiosity about space, light and the behaviour of particles grew steadily. Later, alongside astronomy, optics and electricity became her favourite fields of interest. At home she reads a lot on these topics, and in her spare time she likes to solder small circuits. “I have been to several ELI ALPS events and have always found them inspiring. I have met researchers I can look up to. It is precisely because of previous visits to ELI that I believe I have found the world that really interests me, and this is the field of attosecond laser science,” said the student, who is studying for a degree in economics. Her studies have temporarily sidelined her interest in physics, but she has never completely given it up. Her dreams may come true, as from September she will start her physics and engineering studies in the hope of getting involved in laboratory work and research projects too.
At our Day of Light event, she was impressed by Dr Katalin Varjú’s presentation. Our Science Director gave a talk on ELI ALPS, lasers, attosecond pulses, and light-related Nobel Prizes. Elizabet Kovács was impressed by the passion and dedication with which our Science Director spoke about physics.
The animations presented helped her better understand what goes on inside the laser laboratories. She found it inspiring to see how a theoretical line of research becomes a practical, measurable process, and how ultrafast phenomena can be monitored.
In the introduction to her lecture, our Science Director quoted from Jenő Rejtő’s (P. Howard’s) 1940 novel, The Fourteen Carat Car. The main character, Ivan Gorchev, was just shy of his twenty-first birthday when he won the Nobel Prize for Physics. Winning such a prestigious scientific award at that tender age is undeniably an almost unheard-of achievement. Some will seek to detract from this incredible accomplishment by pointing out that Gorchev won the Nobel Prize for Physics in a game of blackjack from Professor Noah Bertinus (Professor Noah Bertinus is the brainchild of the author.)
However, the Nobel Prize laureate researchers associated with ELI ALPS – Ferenc Krausz, Anne L’Huillier, Gérard Mourou – did not win the prestigious recognition in card games; they earned it through their scientific achievements.
In her lecture, our Science Director mentioned that in a 1917 paper, Albert Einstein predicted stimulated emission in light–matter interactions, which is the fundamental principle behind laser technology. After Einstein, it took 44 years for American physicist-engineer Theodore Maiman to make the first laser operate on 16 May 1960.
Just four years later, the laser appeared on the cinema screen. In the 1964 James Bond episode Goldfinger, a laser beam was used with the intent to cut the protagonist (played by Sean Connery) in half while he was strapped to a table. Then, in the 1977 Star Wars film, a spaceship was captured with a ‘laser’ tractor beam. What was then fiction has now become reality: we use lasers to cut, weld or grip small objects. In the manufacture of mobile phones, for example, seven types of laser equipment are used in 12 different technological steps. Today’s world would be unimaginable without lasers.
Our lasers are unique: they can produce very powerful flashes for very short periods of time. The peak power of one of our devices, which has an average power of 50 watts, equals 5 terawatts for a fraction of a second, more precisely, for a few femtoseconds. This exceeds the power output of the Paks nuclear power plant by 2,600 times. (The difference is that while the power plant produces this power on a continuous basis, our laser mentioned above produces this peak power in femtosecond long pulses.)
The presentation also revealed the structure and applications of high-power lasers. Of course, the attosecond timescale was also mentioned. Dr. Katalin Varjú gave an illustrative example: there are as many attoseconds in a second as the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Big Bang, the birth of the universe, to the present day. In other words, a laser pulse in the attosecond range is an incredibly short flash. This timescale corresponds to the timescale of electron dynamics within atoms and molecules.
For many, the 21st century is the century of photonics. According to Dr. Katalin Varjú, this offers an exceptional opportunity for scientists involved in this field. Therefore, she reiterated her earlier words: „physics is the coolest profession”. She concluded her talk by encouraging young people to study physics and come and work for us.
Photos: Gábor Balázs