Prof. Dr. Ursula Keller

Ursula Keller was appointed an Associate Professor in March 1993 and in October 1997 she became a Full Professor in the Physics Department at ETH Zurich.

Ursula Keller was born in Zug, Switzerland, on June 21, 1959.  She received the "Diplom" in Physics from ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 1984.  From late 1984 to 1985 she worked on optical bistability at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland as a visiting scholar.  She then earned her M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics at Stanford University in California in 1987 and 1989, respectively.  For her first year at Stanford, she held a Fulbright Fellowship, and for the following year she was an IBM Predoctoral Fellow.  Her Ph.D. research demonstrated a novel high-speed optical measurement technique of charge and voltage in GaAs integrated circuits and low-noise ultrafast laser systems.

In 1989, she became a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey, where she conducted research on photonic switching, ultrafast laser systems, and semiconductor spectroscopy.  In March 1993 she was appointed as an Associate Professor in the Physics Department at ETH Zurich, and in October 1997 became a Full Professor. 

Her research interests are exploring and pushing the frontiers in ultrafast science and technology. She invented the semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) which enabled passive modelocking of diode-pumped solid-state lasers and established ultrafast solid-state lasers for science and industrial applications. Pushed the frontier of few-cycle pulse generation and full electric field control at petahertz frequencies. Pioneered frequency comb stabilization from modelocked lasers, which was also noted by the Nobel committee for Physics in 2005. In time-resolved attosecond metrology she invented the attoclock which resolved the electron tunneling delay and observed the dynamical Franz-Keldysh effect in condensed matter for the first time.

More info is available

Homepage Prof. Ursula Keller ETH group: https://ulp.ethz.ch

Home page NCCR MUST, director Prof. Keller: http://www.nccr-must.ch/home.html

Address and CV etc: https://ulp.ethz.ch/people/kursula.html

News: https://ulp.ethz.ch/news.html

Honors und Awards: https://ulp.ethz.ch/publications/awards.html